The Past is Never Dead: A Qualitative Analysis of Recurrent Dreams
Dissertation Defense
Presented to the Faculty
of
The Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology
Adelphi University
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirement for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
By: Julian Rapaport, M.A.
September 14, 2020
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Dissertation Committee
Committee Chair ……………………………………………………. Karen Lombardi, Ph.D.
Committee Member ………………………………………………… Joseph Newirth, Ph.D.
Committee Member ………………………………………………… Robert Mendelsohn, Ph.D.
Special Member …………………………………………………….. Alan Kintzer, Ph.D.
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DEDICATION
My dissertation is dedicated to my parents, my brothers, and my fiancée. I would not be who I am today without each of you. I am grateful to have been raised in a family that has always appreciated the power of dreams.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank my amazing committee for helping me throughout this nightmarish dissertation process. To my chair, Dr. Karen Lombardi: Thank you for your guidance, support, encouragement, and kindness. I appreciate your approach to teaching and mentoring, always putting your students first and never compromising your values in a shifting societal and academic atmosphere. To Dr. Joe Newirth: Thank you for sharing with me your invaluable insight, experience, and theoretical knowledge. I took every class you offered and have been continuously inspired by your psychotherapeutic approach to research and practice. To Dr. Bob
Mendelsohn: I am immensely grateful to you for fostering cohort cohesion, without which my experience in graduate school would not have been as personally meaningful as it turned out to be. I am also grateful for the clinical wisdom and expertise that you imparted on your students from day one, exuding a contagious confidence and love for the field. Finally, to Dr. Alan
Kintzer; Thank you for your support and valuable contribution to my development as a clinician.
You helped me learn how to think clinically in an expansive and flexible way that will help me throughout my career.
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Abstract
Existing literature on recurrent dreams shows that 60-80% of adults report experiencing at least one recurrent dream series in their lifetime (Zadra, 1994). However, there is a dearth of research on the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers and on the potential impact of these dream series on the dreamers’ lives. This study aimed to explore the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers by analyzing the dreamers’ manifest content and themes. Furthermore, this study analyzed the evolution of the recurrent dreams within an individual’s dream series, as well as the similarities and differences between participants’ dream series. Particular attention was paid to the changes in the intensity of the dominant emotion in each dream series, as well as the experienced sense of agency by the dreamer ego. The first author conducted open-ended interviews with six students at Adelphi University. Interview transcripts were analyzed using the
Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis approach (Creswell & Poth, 2018), resulting in the identification of shared dream themes, images, emotions, and intensity of emotions within a sequence of dreams and between recurrent dreamers. The results of the study showed that recurrent dreams tend to change over time, and that each dream series has unique personal significance. Four main theme clusters in dream content emerged across participants (i.e.,
Helplessness/Powerlessness, Connection/Separation, Danger, and Symmetrical Logic).
Moreover, results indicated that active and positive changes in an individual’s dream series over time and decreased intensity of the dominant emotion in the dream may signify growth in an area of emotional or developmental arrest, or in the resolution of an underlying problem. Further research is needed to determine that a function of recurrent dreaming is therapeutic via the mechanism of experience integration.
Keywords: recurrent dreams, dreams, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements... ………………………………………………………………………….…iv
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………....v
Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………………...…1
Chapter Two: Literature Review………………………………………………………………….5
Theories of dreaming...………………….…………………………………………….…..5
Freud…………………………….………………………………………………...5
Jung……………………….…………………………………………..…………...8
Bion……………………………………….………………...... 9
Ogden…………………………………………………………………………….10
Gestalt………………………………………….………………………………...10
Threat simulation theory…………………………………………………………13
Hartmann…………………….…………………….…………………….……….14
Syntheses of Dream Theories……………………………………………………16
Recurrent Dreams……………………………….…………………….…………………18
Definitions……………………..…………………….…………………………..18
Previous research…………….…………………….……………………..……...21
Prevalence…………………….…………………….…………….…...…21
Content…………………….…………………….…………………….…22
Trauma dreams…………………….…………………….……………….26
Themes…………………….…………………….…………………..…...27
Present study…………………….…………………….…………………………………30
Chapter Three: Method………………………...………………………………………………...32 vii
Research Design Overview………………………………………………………………32
Study Participants or Data Sources………………………………………………………32
Participant Recruitment………………………………………………………………….33
Data Collection…………………………………………………………………………..35
Analysis……………………… …………………………………………………………36
Chapter Four: Results……………………………………………………………………………39
Emergent Themes Within Individual Dream Series……………………………………..39
Recurrent Dream Themes Across Participants…………………………………………..48
Changes Within Dream Series…………………………………………………………...66
Chapter Five: Discussion………………………………………………………………………...87
Personal Experience and Bias……………………………………………………………88
Recurrent Dream Frequency, Onset, and Duration………………………………...... 89
Emergent Themes Across Participants’ Dreams…………………………………………90
Changes Over Time Within Recurrent Dream Series…………………………………....95
Attributed Significance by Study Participants………………………………………….100
Additional Findings…………………………………………………………………….102
Limitations of the Study…………………………………………………………….…..102
Implications For Clinical Applications and Future Research……………………….….104
References ………………………………………………………………………………….…..106
Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………...113
Appendix A: Tables…………………………………………………………………….113
Appendix B: IRB Approval…………………………………………………………….115
Appendix C: Informed Consent………………………………………………………...116 viii
Appendix D: Demographics Form…………………………………………………….119
Appendix E: Interview Questions……………………………………………………..121
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Chapter 1: Introduction
When I was six years old I had the terrifying thought that my entire life could be someone else’s dream, and that when they awoke, I would no longer exist. I did not know it then, but I was questioning my very reality. It was my first conscious encounter with existential curiosity and it was sparked by thinking about dreams. This is as far back as I can trace my conscious fascination with dreams, and although I genuinely enjoy thinking and talking about dreams, my path towards this dissertation began with fear. Fear of not being real, of being someone else’s fantasy, of not being in control of my own life.
As I got older, my fear diminished and evolved, and my curiosity grew. When I was eight or nine, I told my parents that I wanted to be a scientist so that I could invent a type of machine where I could hook people up to a screen and watch their dreams like a movie. We are still not there technologically, so I did the next best thing, dedicate my entire doctoral research to learning about why we dream by immersing myself in dream theory, reviewing existing research, and interviewing dreamers.
The scientific approach to interpreting and understanding dreams began with Freud’s theory of dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious” in the early 1900’s (Freud, 1900/2010).
Freud, however, did not invent the use of dreams for therapeutic purposes, and as he notes in chapter one of The Interpretation of Dreams, he was far from the first to originate ways of interpreting dreams and extracting their meaning (1900/2010). In fact, the use and interpretation of dreams dates back to the oldest recorded human civilizations, and forward in time to some of the most influential cultural societies, from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, to Greece and the
Roman Empire, to all major religions and indigenous cultures. As stated by Hughes (2000),
“almost no important work on ancient literature lacks reference to dreams, their interpretation, 2 and their influence on human attitudes and actions.”
For example, the incredibly interesting and telling way that ancient Egyptians depicted dreams in hieroglyphics showed the importance that they placed in their interpretation and understanding. They used the word rswt to refer to dream, which translated literally means “to come awake” and is depicted as an “open eye,” suggesting that dreams meant more than just closing your eyes to sleep (Asaad, 2015). Read in combination with the symbol for sleep, which is represented by a bed, the bed and the open eye “makes the word dream to be read as awaken within sleep” (Asaad, 2015, p. 13). For ancient Egyptians dreaming was a special state of consciousness, “something like watching during sleep” (Lu, 2016, p. 46).
Dreams were treated differently among various early civilizations, but they shared in placing significant value in the interpretation and meaning of dreams (Hughes, 2000). The
Mayans of Central America developed in the area that is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize,
Honduras, and El Salvador as early as 2000 BCE. A large part of the Mayan daily culture included the sharing of dreams. Children were encouraged from an early age to remember their dreams and share them in the mornings (Hughes, 2000). Contrary to the Ancient Egyptians, dreaming in Mayan hieroglyphics was depicted with eyes closed. However, they seem to share in the belief that there is seeing involved, since ancient Mayans believed that dreams are the way in which we “see with our souls” (Laughlin, 1996; Levi, 2010).
Thousands of years after the ancient Egyptians and Mayans recorded their experiences of the phenomena of dreaming, we have barely scratched the surface to understanding the function(s) and process of dreaming. Myriad theories of dreaming have been elaborated, from believing dreams are sent to us in our sleep from divine forces (Asaad, 2015, Hughes, 2000), to believing they have latent symbolic meaning that needs to be discovered (Freud, 1900/2010), to 3 seeing dreams as purely threat simulations for potentially threatening future events (Revuoso,
2000), and to thinking that dreams are meaningless and random neural firings (Hobson &
McCarley, 1977).
Despite the lack of consensus on the purpose and functions of dreams, dream research is lacking and is often dismissed (Blechner, 1998; Lippmann, 2003). Even within the psychoanalytic community, which once viewed dreams as central to understanding the patients in front of them, there is now fragmentation and outright rejection of the utility of dreams in psychotherapy (Blechner, 1998; Lippmann, 2003). According to Mendelsohn (2019), another layer to the decreased utilization of dreams in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is the change of structure and frequency of psychotherapy practice. Instead of exploring a patient’s dreams as a way of understanding the patient’s personality and character, dreams are often used to confirm the correctness of an interpretation (Mendelsohn, 2019).
Dream analysis and exploration, however, does not belong to psychoanalysts, psychologists, philosophers, or researchers. Dreams are a shared experience of all human kind, regardless of time or place of birth, socioeconomic status, race, gender, and age. Like death, dreams are a mortal inevitability and it is in the best interest of all to try and understand dreams and to learn how to incorporate them into our understanding of ourselves.
The world of dreams is as expansive as it is understudied. For the purpose of feasibility, this dissertation will focus specifically on the phenomenon of recurrent dreams. There are multiple varying definitions of what constitutes a recurrent dream (Domhoff, 1993; Hartmann,
2001; Lefing, 2012; Zadra, 1994), and they will be described at length in the following chapter.
For this dissertation, however, recurrent dreams will be operationalized as two or more dreams that are very similar in the emotions felt by the dreamer, sequence of events, and actions taken or 4 not taken by the dreamer.
Initial interest in the phenomenon of recurrent dreams began with the author’s own experience with recurrent dreams, both in childhood and adulthood. As a result of these experiences, the author developed a study aiming to explore the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers by analyzing the dreamers’ manifest content and their direct associations to their dreams. Of particular interest was the significance of dream changes within a dream series, and if and how the actions and emotions of the dreamers within the series changed over time. In addition, the author aimed to discover whether the intensity of the dominant emotions in the dream series changed across dream versions. These questions addressed the similarities and the differences within each participants’ dream series. Finally, the similarities and differences between participants’ dream series were explored by comparing the common themes, images, and emotions.
The next chapter (chapter two) will consist of a review of the existing literature. First, it will consider general theories of dreaming, followed by definitions and theories of recurrent dreams, and concluding with a review of existing research on recurrent dreams and dream themes. Chapter three will address the methodology used to gather and analyze data and to maintain methodological integrity despite the author’s invested interest and experience with recurrent dreams. Chapter four will describe the results, and the findings will be divided into three sections; emergent themes and differences within a dream series, emergent themes and differences across participants, and an analysis of media narrative interpreted as a recurrent dream and compared with the emergent themes from the participants’ dream series. Finally, chapter five will include a discussion of this study’s contributions to the field of dream research, and a consideration for future research and practice. 5
Chapter 2: Literature Review
I am in a house that feels as though it is mine, my girlfriend is there too. Immediately, I am afraid, and I see a monster outside of the glass door trying to get in. Instinctually, knowing it will get inside, I know I will have to kill it. The monster gets in and I stab it in the head with a large metal rod. I look down and the monster is on the floor, at my feet, with a rod sticking through its brain, and it looks up at me and just grins. It is a terrifying feeling seeing this monster’s sinister smile as I push the rod further in and continue to try to kill it, but it does not die.
The vignette above is the first version of the author’s own recurrent dream series. This dream is the first in a series of four dreams that took place over a three-year period in the author’s early twenties. It will be used to help illustrate the different dream theories that will be reviewed in this chapter, and as a point of comparison in the results and discussion sections.
Theories of Dreaming
Freud
As one of the greatest minds in recent history, Sigmund Freud created the field of psychology and psychoanalysis by realizing that many of his patients’ symptoms originated from within their mind, rather than from a physiological condition as was previously thought (Freud,
1900/2010). Commonly known as Freud’s greatest contribution to psychoanalysis was his development of a systematic approach to dream interpretation (Mendelsohn, 2013; Zadra, 1994).
In accordance with the writers and religious scholars of early civilizations, Freud believed that dreams had meaning, that dreams were not random brain activity. However, unlike those early writers and scholars, Freud believed that dreams come from within, that dreams are 6 psychological (Freud, 1900/2010; Mendelsohn, 2013), rather than messages sent from the divine
(Hughes, 2000).
Freud divided dream content into two categories: the manifest content and the latent content. The manifest content tends to involve the dreamer’s day residue, their recent worries, needs, and concerns, in a disguised and digestible form (Lefing, 2012; Mendelsohn, 2013; Pope,
2017). The dream vignette at the beginning of this chapter is an example of the manifest content.
The latent content, on the other hand, is the hidden meaning that emerges from the unraveling of the manifest content and the dreamer’s associations to the dream itself through the use of the psychoanalytic tools of free association and direct inquiry (McDermott, 2017; Mendelsohn,
2013). As an example, returning to the dream vignette, using a metal rod to kill the monster was part of the manifest content, while potentially interpreting the metal rod as a phallic symbol signifying potency would be understood as latent content.
Freud’s work with his patients led him to propose two interrelated functions of dreaming.
One, dreams function as a way to gratify one’s unconscious wishes, dreams as wish fulfilment
(Freud, 1900/2010; Mendelsohn, 2013; Lefing, 2012; Zadra, 1994). This is a form of regression, in that dreams allow for the expression of the id’s childhood wishes, which have been repressed in conscious life (Mendelsohn, 2013; Zadra, 1994). Freud also proposed that another function of dreaming is to preserve sleep (1900/2010). This has been hypothesized from different scientific perspectives as well, and it is believed that preserving sleep in a safe way is part of the reason for the paralysis that occurs during REM sleep (Hartmann, 2001; Walker, 2017). Often, we dream of dangerous and aggressive behaviors, and the paralysis prevents us from acting those behaviors out, both keeping us safe and preserving our sleep (McDermott, 2017; Walker, 2017). 7
For Freud, the goal of interpreting a dream was to retrace the dream distortions back from the manifest content to the hidden, underlying content (Zadra, 1994). He considered free association to be the best tool to achieve this, as he believed that patients would be able to lower their defenses and give Freud the opportunity to link the patients’ associations back to the original infantile wish (Freud, 1900/2010; Zadra, 1994). He believed that the manifest content was created from the latent content through two dream-work mechanisms: condensation and displacement (Freud, 1900/2010; Lefing, 2012; McDermott, 2017). Condensation is the melding of two or more waking-life themes, memories, objects, or persons, into a single dream symbol or character (Freud, 1900/2010; McDermott, 2017). For example, one may dream of a character that is both their grandmother and their teacher, and although in waking-life you can separate the two, in the dream they are an amalgamation. Displacement occurs when a person, object, behavior, or idea are replaced unconsciously by a more acceptable person, object, thought, or idea (Freud, 1900/2010; McDermott, 2017). For example, if a person has an unrecognized and unacceptable wish to aggress towards their mother, they may dream that they are instead being aggressive towards their teacher, which in their conscious mind may be a more forgivable behavior.
In summary, Freud believed that dreams serve two main purposes, wish fulfillment and the preservation of sleep. He believed that dreams are remembered in their manifest content in an attempt to disguise the potentially disturbing or ego dystonic wishes, and that psychoanalysis, especially the use of free association, is the best way to unravel the associative chains and arrive at the latent content in order to eradicate the patients’ symptoms. In addition, he believed that at the core, the wishes fulfilled by dreams were always linked to repressed infantile sexual or aggressive drives (Freud, 1914; McDermott, 2017; Zadra, 1994). 8
Jung
Once one of Freud’s most trusted disciples, Carl Jung was criticized by Freud for breaking from aspects of his theories in order to develop his own perspective (Demorest, 2005;
McDermott, 2017). Like Freud, Jung believed dreams were meaningful and that they emerged from an individual’s unconscious (McDermott, 2017; Pope, 2017). He added, however, the concept of a collective unconscious that is shared by humanity across generations and cultures
(Jung, 1964; Lefing, 2012; Pope, 2017; Zadra, 1994). He believed the collective unconscious to function as a source of shared wisdom, derived from “archaic cultural constructs such as mythology, religion, and art” (Pope, 2017, p. 11). Like Freud, Jung viewed dream images and symbols as seemingly incomprehensible language that needs to be deciphered and understood
(Pope, 2017). Unlike Freud’s dreams as wish fulfillment theory, however, Jung suggested that the function of dreams was compensatory in that it helped restore psychic balance to the individual (Blechner, 2013; Eudell-Simmons & Hilsenroth, 2007; Jung, 1964; Pope, 2017;
Zadra, 1994). For example, if a person is too passive in their waking life, and they are afraid to express or even acknowledge their anger, then they may have aggressive and violent compensatory dreams. Moreover, Jung believed that dreams function to create meaning and experiences that will lead an individual towards internal harmony and psychic integration
(McDermott, 2017).
Another notable difference between Jung and Freud regards the manifest content of dreams. As mentioned above, Freud saw dreams as disguised through condensation and displacement, creating the manifest content the dreamer remembers. The goal in this case would be for Freud to disentangle the distortions in the dream and get to the latent meanings. Jung, however, posited that dreams were not disguised per se, and that there was no intent of deception 9
(Pesant & Zadra, 2004; Zadra, 1994). Instead, Jung gave attention to the dream content itself, believing that the dream images and symbols served a purpose, and were not necessarily hiding the real meaning through distortions (Pope, 2017). In addition, he warned about the problem of over interpreting and needing to arrive at the final meaning of each dream. Instead, he believed there was significant value in exploring the dream content itself since it regularly facilitated the discovery (or recovery) of “insights, emotions, and aspects of self that had been neglected and dormant” (McDermott, 2017, p. 14). Finally, Jung believed that dreams would be better understood as a series of dreams, rather than individually, essentially adding context for more accurate interpretations (Zadra, 1994). The author’s dream vignette, from this perspective, could be understood as the dreamer being overly passive in his waking life, or not confronting a problem or person, and the violence portrayed in the dream may be an attempt to restore the balance between assertiveness and passivity.
Bion
One of the most interesting aspects of Wilfred Bion’s theory of dreaming is that he expanded what counts as a “dream” or as “dreaming” (Sanford, 2017). He believed that dreaming does not take place exclusively in sleeping, but that we dream when we are awake just as well (Bion, 1962; Sanford, 2017). Bion went against the psychanalytic momentum of the times and returned dreaming to its rightful place as the “core of psychological functioning”
(Schneider, 2010, p. 522). When working with dreams psychoanalytically, Bion theorized that it would be more fruitful to focus on the process of dreaming rather than on the symbolic content of dreams (Bion, 1962; Ogden, 2007; Schneider, 2010). In addition, Bion theorized that dreaming is a therapeutic tool on its own, in that it is the way that the mind processes emotional experience unconsciously, imbuing it with meaning (Bion, 1962; Ogden, 2004a; Schneider, 10
2010). He believed that dreaming takes place concurrently with conscious thinking (when awake), and that the unconscious processing of emotional experience is continuous (Schneider,
2010). Bion believed this processing of emotional experience to be the main function of dreaming (Schneider, 2010).
Ogden
Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden derived his thinking on dreams from Bion’s theory of dreaming and not being able to dream (Ogden, 2004b). He describes dreaming as an ongoing process that occurs concurrently in sleep and in unconscious waking life for the purpose of transforming “raw sense impressions into unconscious elements of experience that can be linked” (Ogden, 2004b, p.859). Essentially, he believes that the process of dreaming functions as the primary form of unconscious psychological work, and that psychoanalysis is an attempt at mimicking that generative process of psychological growth (Ogden, 2004a). Psychoanalytic dream work is particularly necessary when a patient is unable to dream (Ogden, 2004b). Ogden, through his interpretation of Bion’s work, understands that if a person in unable to dream their lived experience, then they will be unable to change or grow (Ogden, 2004b). Examples of psychological sleep events that are undreamt according to Ogden include “dreams” that generate no associations in patient or therapist, hallucinations in sleep, imageless feelings, night terrors, and unchanging recurrent and traumatic dreams (Ogden, 2004b).
Gestalt
Gestalt theorists understand dreams to represent fragments of the dreamer’s personality
(Alban & Gorman, 1975; Lefing, 2012; Pesant & Zadra, 2004). They portray owned and disavowed aspects of the self, patterns of interpersonal relating, personality functioning (Alban
& Gorman, 1975), and an “in-depth picture of the patient’s current self and the self’s 11 relationships to internal and external objects” (Eudell-Simmons & Hilsenroth, 2007, p.336).
Unlike Freud and other psychoanalytic approaches, and closer to Jung’s approach to dream interpretation, gestalt therapists focus exclusively on the manifest content of the dream that the patient brings in to the therapy (Eudell-Simmons & Hilsenroth, 2007). For Gestalt therapists, the goal is to integrate the fragmented self and to increase self-awareness (Eudell-Simmons &
Hilsenroth, 2007; Pesant & Zadra, 2004). They view a dream and its images and characters as pieces in a puzzle that need to be put together into a coherent picture (Alban & Gorman, 1975).
Gestalt therapists attempt to better understand the symbolism and metaphors of their patients’ dreams by observing and analyzing the following three dream forms: the reversal of reality, the condensation of reality, and the resistance against reality (Alban & Gorman, 1975).
Although these forms differ from one another, they all share in that they serve the function of avoidance (Alban & Gorman, 1975). The reversal of reality flips an aspect of the dreamer’s reality into its opposite, playing a similar role as Jung’s view of dreams as compensatory (Alban
& Gorman, 1975; Jung, 1964). For example, if a male patient is suffering from sexual impotence, they may dream that they are the powerful or grandiose. Or if they are overly greedy and arrogant, perhaps they will dream of a being embarrassed in front of a group of people. This is a reversal of the reality of the dreamer and indicates an avoidance in part of the dreamer to come to terms with this imbalance. The condensation of reality functions as a condensed reflection of our existence, in that we are not fully experiencing our life, but are merely playing a role within it
(Perls, 1969). In this way, dreams of condensed realities typically include themes such as idealizing, maintaining an “imaginary-like existence of roles and games” (Alban & Gorman,
1975, p. 149). Lastly, and likely most importantly, the resistance against reality portrays the resistance towards integrating the alienated aspects from the self (Alban & Gorman, 1975; Perls, 12
1969). In dreams, resistance is expressed more openly than in waking life as waking life defenses are lowered. This resistance causes more anxiety and is revealed in the symbols, images, and actions within the dream (Alban & Gorman, 1975).
Examining the author’s dream vignette from this perspective, one could interpret the that dreamer’s accepted ego is trying to reject, disavow, and kill an alienated part of the self, represented by the monster, and the inability to kill the monster may indicate that the dreamer needs to accept that part of itself and integrate into the whole of their personality, rather than continue to ineffectively disavow it. For Gestalt theorists, then, dreams represent what is excessive or what is missing from our lives, and these methods of analyzing and interpreting dreams allows the Gestalt therapist and the dreamer to decode the dream’s message and help the patient integrate the self (Alban & Gorman, 1975).
Since Gestalt therapists focus on dream content and avoidance, they find repetitive themes or recurrent dreams to be the most meaningful kind of dream to bring in to therapy
(Alban & Gorman, 1975). They believe that the repetition and persistence of a dream may represent the dreamer’s attempt to address or acknowledge a persistent problem, and therefore represent dreams that are not avoidant in nature but rather attempting to solve a problem that can no longer be avoided (Alban & Gorman, 1975). The repetition, then, is a failed attempt at resolution, and the dreamer’s personality remains fragmented until those disavowed aspects of the self can be integrated. An example of movement towards integration from a Gestalt point of view can be seen in the author’s fourth version of his recurrent dream series. In said dream, instead of trying to kill the monster, first by stabbing it and in a later version by shooting it, the dreamer successfully apprehends the threat without needing to attack it. This movement from 13 raw aggression to a relatively civil resolution would indicate that the dreamer is beginning to integrate the previously alienated part of the self.
Threat Simulation Theory
Unconvinced with the explanations and theories of why we dream, Antti Revonsuo developed a new, evolution-based hypothesis in his “reinterpretation of dreams” called Threat
Simulation Theory (TST) (2000). TST proposes that humans (and other mammals) dream because dreaming functions as an evolutionary tool that allows the dreamer to rehearse realistically threatening events during sleep (Revonsuo, 2000). TST understands dreams to have originated in the Pleistocene era, an era in which early humans where in constant life-threatening danger, vulnerable to wild animals and the forces of nature (Valli et al., 2005; Zadra, Desjardins,
& Marcotte, 2006). Through dreaming, these early humans were able to increase their perceptions of threats, and develop and rehearse behaviors that would help avoid the same threats in waking-life (Zadra et al., 2006). Revonsuo hypothesized that early humans who were able to simulate threats in the safety of their dreams and consequently improve their threat avoidance skills without suffering any physical consequences were more likely to survive, and therefore more likely to reproduce (Revonsuo, 2000; Zadra et al., 2006).
In addition, Revonsuo argues against Alan Hobson’s claim that dream content is random and meaningless (Hobson & McCarley, 1977), proposing that dreams and their content are too organized to be random by-products of neural firing during REM sleep (McDermott, 2017;
Revonsuo, 2000; Walker, 2017). TST adds that the content of dreams is selective and nonrandom, and points to Hartmann’s research which shows that typical waking-life activities such as reading, writing, and calculating are very unrepresented in dreams (2000), and that instead, negative emotions and threatening situations are overrepresented (Hall & Van de Castle, 14
1966; Valli et al., 2005). To further support the hypothesis that dream content is non-random,
TST points out that aggression is the most frequent kind of social interaction in dreams, and that dreamers tend to be the victims of the aggression (Domhoff, 1996; Hall & Van de Castle, 1966).
Revonsuo believes that “ecologically valid threat cues” are necessary to fully activate the threat simulation system in dreams (Valli et al., 2005, p. 191). Basically, he hypothesized that the earlier a child is exposed to life threatening events, personally or vicariously, the earlier they will experience threat simulations in their dreams, and the more frequent and intense that these threat simulations would be (Revonsuo, 2000; Valli et al., 2005). Finally, TST posits that recurrent dreams and nightmares are often simulations of primitive threats, consistent with the idea that dreams are threat simulations of our ancestral environment (Valli et al., 2005). For comparison, the idea that our dreams are rooted in the experiences of our ancestors is compatible with Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious being an accumulation of ancestral wisdom (Jung, 1964).
From this perspective, one could interpret the author’s recurrent dream as a rehearsal, safely practicing how to avoid being killed by a monster. The monster, in this case, could be understood as a modernization of ancestral threats against wild animals or other humans, placed in the context of the dreamer’s current life.
Hartmann
Ernest Hartmann was one of the most prominent dream theorists and researchers of modern times. Understanding from his own clinical experience and research that dreams are relevant and meaningful, Hartmann stated that the most important lesson he learned from Freud and Jung is the extremely essential “art of making use of dreams” (Hartmann, 2001, p. 3).
Through his research and practice, in which he claims to have gathered over 5,000 of his own dreams and 10,000 dreams provided by patients and research participants, Hartmann developed 15 the contemporary theory of dreaming (Hartmann, 2001). In this theory, he makes the following six statements about the functionality of dreaming: (a) Dreaming is a process of making connections, (b) dreaming allows for broader connections than what is possible in waking life,
(c) the connections made in dreams are not random, but are rather guided by the dreamer’s emotions, (d) dreaming contextualizes emotion, (e) since the connections are broad, dreaming is particularly good at making metaphors and noting similarities, and (f) the broad making of connections in dreams serves the purpose of “smoothing out” disturbances by integrating new material and producing more interconnections weaving in old and new material (Hartmann,
2001, pp. 3-4).
Hartmann posits that dreaming is similar to therapy in that change occurs by making new connections in a safe place (Blechner, 2013; Hartmann, 2001; Hartmann, 2010). In psychotherapy, the safe place is provided both physically and emotionally, creating boundaries and building a working alliance. In dreaming, the safe place is provided by the muscular inhibition of REM sleep which prevents the dreamer from acting out the dream, keeping the body safe (Hartmann, 2001; Walker, 2017). Hartman states that, in psychotherapy, when working with a patient who has suffered a trauma, and after a safe and trusting environment has been fostered, the work is to help the patient make new connections about the traumatic event, and as this happens, the emotions associated with the trauma begin to lessen in their power
(Hartmann, 2001).
In order to better understand the function of dreams, Hartmann, in his research, tended to focus on dreams after a trauma or on recurrent dreams. He believed that dreams after a trauma are particularly helpful in trying to understand the function of dreams, because since these dreamers are still in the process of resolving the trauma, we can know what is on the dreamer’s 16 mind in an “emotionally meaningful sense” (Hartmann, 2001, p. 19). Hartmann also found recurrent dreams to more clearly show how dreams address emotional concerns than an independent dream, because in a series of recurrent dreams one is able to see emotional movement (Hartmann, 2001). Typically, Hartmann found that recurrent dream series moved in the direction of diminished intensity of emotion and decreased fear (Hartmann, 1984; Hartmann,
2001). He believed this is the case because as the trauma or the problem is dreamt, it ceases to be
“uniquely distressing,” and becomes interwoven in the network of emotional material
(Hartmann, 1984, p. 6). For example, a dreamer may experience terror when dreaming about being chased by dogs, and this dream may reoccur. Through the process of making new connections, whether it is through therapy or by dreaming, the dream may begin to change.
Instead of feeling terror, the dreamer may begin to experience vulnerability, or shame, or fear, but to a lesser degree that is not experienced as intensely as terror (Hartmann, 2001).
When working with dreams clinically, Hartmann acknowledges the usefulness of exploring the dream elements and free associating to the dream in order to discover latent content (Hartmann, 2001). However, he disagreed with Freud in that he believed that it would be a mistake to solely focus on the latent content, and instead argued that “we can no more substitute the latent thoughts for the dream than we can substitute a critic’s explanation of a work of art for the work of art itself” (Hartmann, 2010, p. 18).
Synthesis of Dream Theories
All theorists mentioned above included theories specifically about the functionality of dreams and dreaming. Freud believed that dreaming served two main functions, the fulfillment of an unconscious wish, linked to repressed sexual or aggressive drives, and the preservation of sleep. He believed that symptoms could be resolved by analyzing the latent content of dreams. 17
Parting from Freud’s interpretation of dreams, Jung believed that the function of dreams was compensatory, helping the individual to restore their psychic balance, and that dreams also serve to create meaning out of experiences, leading to psychic integration. In contrast to Freud, Jung focused on the manifest content of dreams. Gestalt theory is closer to Jung’s view of dreams than that of Freud’s. Gestalt theorists focus on the manifest content of a dream, and like Jung, believe that the repetition of a dream may indicate a developmental arrest or stasis that needs to be addressed, and that the function of analyzing these dreams is to bring awareness to the individual’s fragmented aspects of the self and integrate them into a more holistic self- representation.
Bion expanded the concept of dreams to the process of dreaming, and believed that dreaming functions as a therapeutic tool for unconscious psychological processing of emotional experience. Heavily influenced by Bion, Ogden also understood dreaming as the primary form of unconscious psychological work. Ogden believed that if an individual is not able to dream their lived experiences, then they will not be able to change or grow. In a similar vein, Hartmann believed that the main function of dreaming is to make connections that are not possible to make in conscious life, and that these connections serve to integrate new material and weave it into old, previously processed material. Although Hartmann admitted to the value of interpreting the latent content of a dream, like Jungian and Gestalt theories, he placed more emphasis on the manifest content of a dream. In addition, like Ogden and Bion, he believed that dreaming has a similar function to therapy in that it allows new connections to be made in a safe place.
Somewhat of an outlier, TST proposes that the function of dreams is to rehearse realistically threatening situations from the safety of our dreams in order to increase our chances of survival.
To some extent, TST is related to Freud’s theory, in that part of the function of dreams it to 18 preserve sleep. A stronger connection, however, is made with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, since TST posits that nightmares are simulations of primitive events from our ancestral environment.
This author’s view of dreaming is more closely aligned with that of Hartmann, Bion,
Ogden, and Jung. This author’s emerging theory of the function of dreams is that dreaming serves a therapeutic role that allows us to make connections of our lived experiences. Like Jung,
Hartmann, Bion, and Ogden, this author believes that repetitive and unchanging dreams indicate a stasis in some form of psychological development or an emotional experience that is unable to be processed. Therefore, a new change in a previously static dream possibly indicates movement along a continuum of psychological growth. Finally, this author believes that a fundamental purpose of therapy is to supplement the process of dreaming when dreaming alone is not enough.
Recurrent Dreams
Definitions
Recurrent dreams are a difficult concept to define and have been operationalized differently by many theorists, clinicians, and researchers (Gauchat, Zadra, Tremblay, Zelazo, &
Séguin, 2009; Lefing, 2012; Zadra, 1994). Part of the reason why it has been challenging for psychologists to arrive at a consensus definition of recurrent dreams is because repetitive dreams are manifested in different ways along a continuum of repetition (Lefing, 2012; Zadra, 1994).
According to Domhoff (1993), recurrent dreams are part of the “repetition dimension” that also includes trauma dreams, recurrent themes within a long series, and the repetition of characters, objects, and actions that occur in every-day dreams over a long period of time. In Domhoff’s continuum of repetition, trauma dreams appear at one extreme of the spectrum as the most intense form of repetition, and these tend to be dreams that are emotionally overwhelming to the 19 dreamer (1993). Overwhelming, traumatic dreams as a consequence of a traumatic event are recognized by the APA as one of the main symptoms in posttraumatic stress disorder (APA,
2013). According to various research studies, even repetitive traumatic dreams that tend to be almost identical will begin to have positive changes in the content of the dream as the individual beings to process their experience (Ellis, 2016; Hartman, 1984).
Second in the continuum and in intensity of repetition is Domhoff’s definition of a recurrent dream. A recurrent dream, similarly to traumatic dreams, is replayed over a series of dreams and tends to be very similar, although not identical (Domhoff, 1993; Zadra, 1994; Zadra,
1996). In addition, it is different from traumatic dreams in that the dreams are not typically directly representing a particular event or experience, but are rather depicting a personal conflict metaphorically through its images and symbols (Domhoff, 1993; Zadra, 1994). Even though recurrent dreams are not typically about a specific situation, they do tend to occur in times of stress or in periods of transition (Brown & Donderi, 1986; Cartwright, 1979; Hartmann, 2001;
Zadra, 1994). Next on the continuum are recurrent dream themes. These dreams tend to be about similar situations, such as being chased or being lost, but the content of the dreams are different from one another (Domhoff, 1993). The majority of “recurrent dream” research operationalizes recurrent dreams as somewhere in between Domhoff’s (1993) definitions of recurrent dreams and recurrent dream themes (Hartmann, 2001). Last on the repetition continuum is the appearance of certain characters, objects, and actions, and these dreams are very different in content and occur over many years (Domhoff, 1993; Zadra, 1994). Despite the fact that Domhoff differentiates between these points on the repetition continuum, he believes that they all reflect attempts by the psyche to resolve an emotional conflict (1993). 20
Another way that repetitive dreams have been categorized is as idiopathic versus posttraumatic dreams (Kunze, Arntz, Morina, Kindt, & Lancee, 2017; Spoormaker, 2008). Most research studies do not separate the two kinds of dreams, or nightmares, but they have considerable differences that are consistent with the differences between Domhoff’s trauma dreams, recurrent dreams, and recurrent dream themes. The main differences between posttraumatic and idiopathic dreams is that posttraumatic dreams are often close to exact replications of the original trauma (although not always), while idiopathic dreams include repetitive themes and content not directly related to an instigating event (Kunze et al., 2017;
Spoormaker, 2008). In spite of their differences, idiographic and posttraumatic dreams both signal a kind of arrested development, and positive changes in the narrative of the dreams either leads to, or signals an elevation in well-being (Kunze et al., 2017; Spoormaker, 2008).
Although there are differences in definitions of recurrent dreams, there is a consensus among various researchers and theorists that recurrent dreams depict that an individual has an unresolved or unprocessed emotional concern that needs to be addressed (Gauchat et al., 2009;
Lefing, 2012; Zadra, 1994). For example, Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists viewed repetitive dreams as attempts as mastering a trauma (Duke & Davidson, 2002; Freud,
1900/2010). Jung believed that recurrent dreams warn the dreamer of an unresolved psychological conflict, and that these dreams were essential in the pursuit of psychic integration
(Jung, in Adler 1973). He believed the repetitive nature of the dreams signified stasis in personal development, and that the cessation of the recurrent dreams would anticipate an increase in well- being (Jung, in Mattoon, 1978). Bion and Ogden categorized unchanging recurrent dreams as undreamt dreams, indicating that the individual is unable to dream, and therefore unable to grow or change (Ogden, 2004b; Ogden, 2007). Gestalt dream theorists viewed recurrent dreams as 21 showing the dreamer their state of psychic imbalance, and that it could either mean the dreamer is persistently attempting to resolve an issue, or that they are stuck due to continuous avoidance of the issue (Alban & Gorman, 1975). Overall, theories of recurrent dreams are in agreement that these kinds of repetitive dreams are signifying a “lack of progress in recognizing and resolving conflicts in the dreamer’s life” (Zadra, 1994, p. 25).
Previous research
Prevalence. Studies on the prevalence of recurrent dreams have been scarce (Zadra,
1996). Moreover, studies that include the prevalence of recurrent dreams are often convoluted with other kinds of dreams and nightmares, such as traumatic dreams and recurrent dream themes, and they tend to be retrospective (APA, 2013; Zadra, 1994; Zadra, 1996). Therefore, the following statistics are likely somewhat inaccurate and should be considered lightly until more clarifying research is done on the subject. Based on the studies that include the prevalence of recurrent dreams and/or recurrent dream themes, it is believed that 60% to 75% of college students and older adults have experienced at least one “recurrent dream” in their lifetime
(Cartwright, 1979; Zadra, 1994; Zadra, 1996). These findings were gathered by asking participants if they have ever had a recurrent dream, suggesting that participants were responding based on their own definitions of what a recurrent dream is (Cartwright, 1979; Zadra, 1994). In addition, 70% to 80% of adults who have participated in dream studies have indicated that they had at least one recurrent dream series in their early childhood (Brown & Donderi, 1986; Zadra,
1994). Research has also shown that some childhood recurrent dreams have persisted into adulthood (Zadra, 1994; Zadra, 1996), although there are reports that some of the content and characters of the recurrent dream series evolve over time (Hartmann, 2001). For example,
Hartman noted that children often dream of being chased by animals or monsters, and that in 22 adulthood, similar dreams often occur with the assailant being a human, or a human-like figure
(2001). Additionally, Cartwright found that 86% of repetitive dreams that began in childhood were experienced as unpleasant, and that as the individuals become older, the intensity of the affect and the agency experienced by the dreamer changed (1979). These findings indicate that the locus of control was external in childhood and became more internal as the dreamer matured in age (Cartwright, 1979; Lefing, 2012). Some findings also indicate that recurrent dreams may occur more frequently in women that in men (Zadra, 1994).
A German study on the cognitive model of recurrent nightmares found that frequent nightmares often have a repetitive storyline (Spoormaker, 2008). Spoormaker found that of the
188 college students who participated in this study, at least 60% of the nightmares reported had a repetitive storyline, and 91% of participants who reported having more than one nightmare a week also reported repetitive storylines (2008). Another German study that collected a sample of recurrent nightmares in schoolchildren found that 44% of the nightmares were reported to have a repetitive storyline (Schredl & Pallmer, 1998). The cognitive model of recurrent nightmares proposed by Spoormaker posits that the nightmare script and recurring images evoke intensely unpleasant emotions, most often intense fear (2008).
Content. Regarding the content of recurrent dreams and dream themes, up to 85% have been found to be unpleasant, while only 10% of recurrent dreams have been described to be pleasant (Cartwright, 1979; Zadra, 1994; Zadra, 1996). As mentioned above, over 86% of childhood recurrent dreams are experienced as threatening or unpleasant, and in 70% of these dreams, external agents are reported as responsible for the threatening content (Cartwright,
1979). Hartman theorized these kinds of childhood recurrent nightmares as “contextualizing the inevitable vulnerability of a small child in a world run by large, much more powerful creatures— 23 adults” (Hartmann, 2001, p. 50). It has also been found that as individuals get older, they tend to report fewer threatening recurrent dreams compared to their childhood (Robbins & Tanck, 1992;
Zadra, 1994). Moreover, Mendelsohn (2019) described the content of recurrent dreams to be related to the developmental spectrum. He noted that recurrent dreams in childhood are often related to the child attempting to master a certain developmental task, a recurrent dream in adolescence typically connected to separation, individuation, and the consolidation of personal identity, and recurrent dreams in young adulthood tend to be about beginning a career and making certain life decision (Mendelsohn, 2019). Furthermore, Cartwright found that recurrent dreams reported by subjects in their 20’s and 30’s included more agency, and that the dreamer was increasingly responsible for the actions taken in the dream (1979).
Another study on the content of recurrent dreams found that 66% of recurrent dreams included at least one threat, often more than one, and that these threats were dangerous and targeted the dreamer (Zadra et al., 2006). They also found that when targeted by a threat, the dreamer was likely to engage in defensive or evasive actions (Zadra et al., 2006). A study by
Cartwright and Romanek (1978) found that only 48% of male students rated their repetitive dreams as unpleasant compared to 77% of female students. However, a follow up study by
Cartwright (1979) found that only 46% of adult women rated their dreams as highly unpleasant.
In addition, the everyday dreams of individuals who have had recurrent dreams were found to include more negative content than the daily dreams of individuals who reported never having had a recurrent dream (Brown & Donderi, 1986; Lefing, 2012).
The high prevalence of negative emotions and unpleasant situations experienced by recurrent dreamers may be tied to the dreamer’s own distress, as several studies have found recurrent dreamers to have lower levels of well-being than non-recurrent dreamers (Brown & 24
Donderi, 1986; Lefing, 2012; Gauchat et al., 2009; Gauchat, Séguin, McSween-Cadieux, &
Zadra, 2015; Robbins & Houshi, 1983; Zadra, 1994). One study found that college students who reported having recurrent dreams scored significantly higher on the Beck Depression Inventory than students who did not have recurrent dreams (Robbins & Houshi, 1983). Other studies found that recurrent dreamers scored significantly lower (poorer) on several well-being measures, such as neuroticism, anxiety, depression, and somatic symptomatology (Brown & Donderi, 1986;
Zadra, O’Brien, & Donderi, 1997), and that recurrent dreams tend to increase in frequency in periods of stress (Duke & Davisdon, 2002; Lefing, 2012). Furthermore, the cessation of recurrent dreams has been linked to an increase in well-being, although the elevation sometimes occurs up to one year after the cessation of the dreams (Brown & Donderi, 1986), and positive changes in dreams have been reported following successful psychotherapy (Lefing, 2012; Zadra, 1996)
Zadra designed a study to gather more detailed data regarding the content of recurrent dreams than had been previously studied (Zadra, 1996). For this study, Zadra (1996) collected
163 recurrent dreams from a pool of 250 dreams. The inclusion criteria dictated that recurrent dreams must have occurred over a period of at least six months, the subject must have rated their recurrent dreams as always, or almost always identical, and the dream must have been described in enough detail to analyze the content of the dream’s setting, emotional tone, and characters present (Zadra, 1996). This study also compared the content of childhood versus adult recurrent dreams, and defined adult recurrent dreams as those dreams that began after the age of 18, and childhood dreams if they only recurred up to age 12 (Zadra, 1996). Using Hall and Van de
Castle’s (1966) dream content analysis system, Zadra measured for dream affect, success and failure, and good fortune and misfortunes. 25
The results indicated that fear and apprehension were the most frequently reported emotions. These emotions were present in 67% of adult recurrent dreams and in 79% of childhood recurrent dreams, supporting previous findings that childhood recurrent dreams include more negative emotions than adult recurrent dreams (Cartwright, 1979; Zadra, 1996).
Other negative emotions often reported in these dreams were sadness, anger, guilt, and confusion
(Zadra, 1996). Interestingly, although success in these dreams was rare in both child and adult recurrent dream groups, adult recurrent dreamers were more likely to experience explicit failures than childhood recurrent dreams (Zadra, 1996). Perhaps this is due to the increased agency in the actions taken by the dreamer in adult dreams versus childhood dreams. Lastly, over 70% of the misfortunes reported in child and adult recurrent dreams occurred to the dreamer, and less than
5% of recurrent dreams reported good fortune (Zadra, 1996).
Zadra (2014) concludes that recurrent dreams occur in times of stress, contain negative dream content, and are associated with poorer scores on psychological well-being. Furthermore, he suggests that since individuals who have not had recurrent dream themes score higher on well-being than individuals who have recurrent dreams, there may be an inverse relationship between psychological well-being and Domhoff’s (1993) repetition continuum. This would indicate that persons with traumatic dreams suffer from lower psychological well-being than persons with recurrent dreams or recurrent dreams themes, and that persons with recurrent dream themes have higher psychological well-being scores than persons with recurrent dreams or traumatic dreams (Zadra, 1996). He agrees with Domhoff (1993) in stating that all the dreams within the repetition continuum “reflect attempts at resolving emotional preoccupations” (Zadra,
1996, p. 240). 26
Trauma Dreams. On the extreme end of the repetition continuum are the trauma dreams
(Domhoff, 1993). Trauma dreams are the most repetitive and identical within the continuum, and are often associated with severe psychological distress (Ellis, 2016; Hartmann, 2001). Recurrent nightmares are one of the main features of posttraumatic stress disorder (APA, 2013), and about
50% to 70% of individual with PTSD suffer from chronic nightmares (Ellis, 2016). Studies have shown that recurrent nightmares often persist despite other PTSD symptoms being alleviated
(Ellis, 2016; Spoormaker & Montgomery, 2008), suggesting that recurrent nightmares may require special attention and more direct treatment. In fact, studies that specifically targeted recurrent nightmares and their related stress have shown that alleviation of nightmares corresponded with a reduction of PTSD symptoms (Davis & Wright, 2007; Ellis, 2016; Krakow et al., 2000, Krakow et al., 2001; Moore & Krakow, 2010).
In order to examine the subjective nature of recurrent nightmares and the potential therapeutic value of treating the nightmares directly, Ellis (2016) conducted a study using focusing-oriented dreamwork (FOD) with trauma survivors with repetitive PTSD nightmares.
Ellis analyzed the results using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) by observing the dream changes that occurred throughout the treatment (2016). The FOD is a treatment that utilizes imagery rescripting to alter the dream endings of their repetitive nightmares. This study treated five refugees suffering from recurrent nightmares as a result of a specific trauma.
Findings showed three major areas in which the dream content changed; the identity of the aggressor, the actions of the dream ego, and temporal and setting changes (Ellis, 2016).
Additionally, the changes in the dream content correlated with significant improvement in other
PTSD symptoms (Ellis, 2016). 27
Ellis understood these results as an “apparent interruption in the cycle of fear” (2016, p.
197). She noted that these dreams contained the three major threat responses of fight, flight, and freeze, and noticed the pattern of movement from passive to active actions by the dream ego
(Ellis, 2016). She suggested that trauma recovery may be reflected by the beginning of changes in repetitive dreams, and that individuals whose recurrent nightmares were less strictly identical to the trauma were the most likely to respond to the treatment (Ellis, 2016). She concluded that the key mechanism for change in treating individuals with traumatic dreams is to stop the cycle of fear, as a reduction of fear seems to reduce all PTSD symptoms (Ellis, 2016).
Themes. Various studies in several different countries have explored the themes that often emerge in recurrent dreams and nightmares (Ellis, 2016; Gauchat et al., 2015; Spoormaker,
2008; Yu, 2016b; Zadra, 1996; Zadra et al., 2006). A study by Zadra, Desjardins, and Marcotte
(2006) found that close to 66% of recurrent dreams collected contained at least one threatening event. They found that the most commonly occurring type of threat regarded escapes and pursuits from an assailant, and that the dreamer was the target of the threatening event in 94% of the reported dreams (Zadra et al., 2006). In fewer cases, up to 4%, the target was a person or object of significance to the dreamer (Zadra et al., 2006). In the dreams in which the dreamer was the target of the threat, the threat was death or serious injury in 65% of the dreams, and threats to the dreamer’s psychological well-being occurred in 22% of cases (Zadra et al., 2006).
In general, the study found that the dreamer tended to be an active participant in the dream action, and the dreamer would fight the threat in 34% of cases and flee the threat in 39% of the threatening dreams, doing both in just 5% of dreams (Zadra et al., 2006). The threat was resolved positively in only 17% of cases, while 40% of dreams ended in the threat being realized, and in
37% of the cases the dreamer awoke before a resolution to the threat (Zadra et al., 2006). 28
Interestingly, in the majority of cases (81%), the threats originated from a fantastic and fictional source, while less than 20% of threats were realistic in waking life (Zadra et al., 2006).
Another study by Zadra (1994) comparing the thematic content of adults and childhood recurrent dreams found that the most frequently recorded theme for both adults and children was the theme of being chased. However, there were clear differences between the two groups. In
86% of the chase dreams from childhood, the dreamer would be chased by a fantastic creature, such as a monster, witch, or wild animal (Zadra, 1994). In contrast, adults were pursued by fantastic creatures in less than 20% of the chase dreams, and were instead typically pursued by human or human-like characters (Zadra, 1994). These findings are consistent with Hartmann’s observation regarding the differences in child and adult recurrent dreams (Hartmann, 2001). The next most frequent dream themes in adult recurrent dreams were about problems with house maintenance, being trapped or alone, and facing natural disasters (Zadra, 1994). In Childhood recurrent dreams, the second most frequent theme was the death of a family member, whether by murder or due to an accident (Zadra, 1994). The theme of danger was present in 42% of adult dreams and 65% of childhood recurrent dreams, and the dreamers, both adult and child, tended to flee, hide, or helplessly watch (Zadra, 1994). Finally, the few dreams that included pleasant emotions were either about flying, exploring a new place, or excelling at a particular activity
(Zadra, 1994).
A study looking at the content of recurrent dreams in young adolescents found the most prevalent themes to be confrontation with a fantastic character (monsters, animals, zombies), physical aggression, falling, being chased, car accidents, deaths and illnesses, being lost or trapped, and being late (Gauchat et al., 2015). A study analyzing the themes of adult bad dreams and nightmares, not necessarily recurrent, found the most common themes to be about physical 29 aggression, interpersonal conflicts, failure or helplessness, illness and death, apprehension, being chased, evil force, accidents, disasters, and environmental anomalies (Robert & Zadra, 2014). In addition, this study found that the main emotion present in these dreams, by a very large margin, was fear (Robert & Zadra, 2014). Fear was followed by sadness, anger, confusion, positive emotion, disgust, frustration, and guilt.
A qualitative study exploring the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers carried out a thematic analysis in order to identify common themes and recurrent dream content (Lefing,
2012). The following themes emerged: powerlessness over a central problem or conflict, connection and separation, and endangerment (Lefing, 2012). A feeling of powerlessness was one of the main themes that were common among recurrent dreamers (Lefing, 2012). This powerlessness tended to be about a central problem or conflict in the dream, and included being in a dangerous situation, being restricted in movement, suffering a loss, and lacking a necessary object or ability (Lefing, 2012). Connection and separation was also a frequently occurring theme, and it tended to deal with interpersonal separation and disrupted relationships (Lefing,
2012). There were also dreams that connected the dreamer to friends and family, often with individuals who have passed away or are no longer in the dreamer’s life (Lefing, 2012). Lastly, as has been found in all the previous studies mentioned above, a feeling of endangerment was also present in this study (Lefing, 2012).
Chinese researcher Yu conducted a review of research findings regarding typical dream themes (2016b). He included two studies from the United States (1936, 1958), one Japanese study (1958), a Canadian study (2003), a German study (2004), and two studies in China conducted by him (2008, 2009) (Yu, 2016a). Despite the difference in culture, space, and time, several commonalities were found. For example, falling was a theme in six out of the seven 30 studies, being pursued was present in all seven studies, and a theme related to school and/or examinations was also present in all seven studies (Yu, 2016a). Some themes that were present in at least two of the studies include being late, being attacked, sexual experiences, and repeatedly trying to do something and failing (Yu, 2016a). Although these themes are taken from every day, typical dreams, and not from recurrent dreams, they show the universality and consistency of dream themes, and the fact that unpleasant dreams are highly prevalent (Yu,
2016a; Yu, 2016b).
Present Study
The purpose of this study is to explore the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers by analyzing the dreamers’ manifest content and their direct associations to their dreams. For this study, recurrent dreams are operationalized as two or more dreams that are very similar in the emotions felt by the dreamer, sequence of events, and actions taken or not taken by the dreamer.
First, the similarities and differences between participants’ dream series are explored, and second, the similarities and differences within individuals’ recurrent dream series are explored.
This is a qualitative, phenomenological study, that aims to analyze the potential significance of the dream changing its manifestation within a dream series, whether the intensity of the dominant emotions change, and if the actions of the dreamer change within the series.
Moreover, the author will analyze semi-structured interviews using the Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) technique in order to explore the common themes, images, and emotions between participants’ recurrent dreams.
This study will add incremental value to the existent literature of recurrent dreams. First, it will build upon the limited qualitative research focusing on the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers and allowing for the emergence of recurring themes. Although previous 31 research and dream theories are consistent with the view that repetitive dreams reflect an attempt to resolve emotional concerns, it is unclear whether the dream is actually reflecting change that is already occurring, or whether change might occur as a result of experiencing the dreams. In addition, it is unclear if these dreams are effective in arriving at a resolution of the source of distress. To this end, the second way in which this study will add to the field is by observing the changes in particularities over time in recurrent dream series with the goal of determining if the functionality of recurrent dreams is therapeutic in itself, or if they have the more modest function of informing the dreamer that something is wrong.
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Chapter 3: Method
Research Design Overview
The present study was conducted using a qualitative, phenomenological approach to inquiry. In order to explore the phenomenon of recurrent dreaming and the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers, the principal investigator recruited and interviewed six participants (N =
6); four undergraduate students and two graduate level psychology students. Semi-structured interviews were held with each participant for approximately 60 minutes. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and the text was coded and analyzed using the Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis technique to identify significant statements and clusters of meaning
(Creswell & Poth, 2018). A phenomenological approach was chosen for this study because phenomenology aims to compare subjective experiences of recurrent dreaming in order to arrive at a description of the essence of the phenomenon. For the purpose of this study, a recurrent dream series is conceptualized as two or more dreams that are very similar in the emotions felt by the dreamer, sequence of events, and actions taken or not taken by the dreamer.
Study Participants or Data Sources
Research Description
The author’s interest in the phenomenon of recurrent dreams arose from his own experience of recurrent dreaming and from review of the limited literature on the subject.
Throughout the study, and particularly during data analysis, the author made continuous conscious efforts to suspend his own beliefs and experience of the phenomenon in order to explore it as objectively and free of personal bias as possible. All themes found in this study emerged from the analysis of the participants’ transcripts alone.
33
Participants and Researcher-Participant Relationship
The participants recruited for this study were four female undergraduate students at
Adelphi University, recruited via the university’s Sona-Systems for research participation, and two graduate level psychology students at Adelphi University, one male and one female, recruited via word-of-mouth. One other participant was interviewed and rewarded research credit for participation, but was dropped from the analysis because their report failed to meet the author’s conceptualization of recurrent dreams. The six participants range in age from 18 to 29, with an average age of 22. Four participants identified as Caucasian, one as Hispanic, and one as
White/Hispanic, and all reported that English was their first language. The author of this study conducted all interviews. No prior relationships existed between the author and the four undergraduate students. However, a minimal peer-relationship existed between the author and the two graduate students who agreed to participate. Due to the qualitative research design and the phenomenological approach to analysis, six participants were considered sufficient.
Typically, phenomenological studies include heterogeneous groups that vary in size from four to
15 individuals (Creswell & Poth, 2018).
Participant Recruitment
Recruitment Process
The four undergraduate participants were recruited through Adelphi University’s Sona-
Systems for research participation. The author posted available time-slots on the Sona-Systems website in which undergraduate students in need of research credits could sign up. When a student signed up for a time-slot, the author was notified and participants were contacted over email to thank them for their participation and inform them of the study’s location. In addition, the two graduate students were recruited via word-of-mouth within the psychology department at 34
Adelphi University. Prior to recruitment, the author received approval from Adelphi University’s
Institutional Review Board and precautions were implemented to protect the identity of the student participants. Before participants were interviewed, they were asked to review and sign an
Informed Consent Form (with audio recording consent embedded) and to complete a
Demographic Questionnaire. The principal investigator then generated a participant ID code on each form to ensure that participants’ reports were de-identified. Additionally, audio recordings were taken from each interview and transcribed verbatim by the author. Audio recordings and transcripts were stored on a password encrypted computer that only the principal investigator had access to.
During the design of the study, the author determined that 4 to 10 participants were needed for an adequate exploration of the phenomenon. Four was determined to be the minimum number of participants in order to be able to carry out in-depth comparative analyses (Creswell
& Poth, 2018), and it was decided not to exceed 10 participants because of the time constraints, as interviewing, transcribing, and analyzing the data is a lengthy process. Five undergraduate students had initially signed up for the study. However, the report of one of the participants was inconsistent with the author’s conceptualization of a recurrent dream, and their interview was dropped from the analysis, resulting in the final sample of four undergraduate student participants. Since the participant number was at the minimum (4), the author opted to recruit the two graduate students for a larger sample of N=6. The true purpose of the study was revealed to the participants during the interview, and since there was no deceit, participants were not debriefed post-study.
35
Participant Selection
Participants were selected using a purposive sample method based on the predetermined requirement of having experienced recurrent dreams. As mentioned above, a recurrent dream is operationalized as two or more dreams that are very similar in the emotions felt by the dreamer, sequence of events, and actions taken or not taken by the dreamer. Having an experience of recurrent dreaming that matches the author’s operationalization was the only inclusion criteria in this study. In addition, there were two exclusion criteria. Persons younger than 18 years old were excluded from this study, as well as individuals whose recurrent dreams were related to a specific trauma or suffered from PTSD. Therefore, the recurrent dreams collected were idiographic recurrent dreams rather than traumatic dreams (Kunze et al., 2017; Spoormaker,
2008). Data was collected at the clinic offices of the Derner School of Psychology’s Center for
Psychological Services during the 2017-2018 academic school year.
Data Collection
Data Collection/Identification Procedures
The data for this study was collected in the form of six semi-structured interviews that were held for 45 to 70 minutes, with an average of approximately 60 minutes. Since data- collection and data-analysis are an ongoing process in a phenomenological analysis, an alteration was made to the data-collection strategy to make certain that participants’ dreams met the study’s criteria for recurrent dreams. Following an interview with a participant whose dream report did not meet the criteria for a recurrent dream, the author implemented a simple screening process.
When new subjects signed-up for the study, they participated in a brief phone call with the author in order to make sure that their understanding of a recurrent dream matched the author’s criteria. Each participant was interviewed once, and only the participant and the author were 36 present during data-collection. The interviews were guided by prepared general questions regarding the participants’ subjective experience of recurrent dreaming (Table 1), and further questions were determined in-interview by the content that was brought up by each participant.
Each interview ended when the author had no more questions regarding the participants’ experiences and the participants had no more information or associations to report.
Recording and Data transformation
All interviews were audio recorded using the author’s computer and the recording files were transcribed verbatim by the author. The computer, recording files, and transcripts were password protected.
Analysis
Data-Analytic Strategies
The qualitative method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was utilized to code the transcripts. First, the author read each transcript completely. On the second read- through, the author made comments in the margins and highlighted significant statements. Then, he reviewed the comments and noted emerging themes within each transcript. Next, the author compared the emerging themes across transcripts, and described the identified themes. Finally, transcripts and themes were reviewed by a team of research colleagues and mentors, who commented on the findings and suggested changes, leading to the final set of themes presented.
Methodological Integrity
As was mentioned above, interest in the study of the phenomenon of recurrent dreams emerged from the author’s own experience with recurrent dreams. In order to limit the influence of the author’s own experience on the collection and analysis of data, no hypotheses or themes were created a priori. Instead, all themes that emerged in the analysis were grounded in the 37 interviews. Table 2 lists the themes that emerged across participants (all themes will be reviewed in detail in the following chapter).
For example, the theme of dread was found in the interview transcripts of four of the six participants, and the method of arriving at the shared theme is shown with the following quotes.
P1: “And I feel like the ticking kind of scared me a little bit.
Because it’s very like, I feel like it’s anxious, like I feel like there’s
something that you are like waiting for.”
P3: “Just a feeling that I have to get away because something was
gonna happen to me.”
P4: “But I’m like kind of like crouching, almost like I’m like
suspiciously like looking around, like seeing if there is like
anything behind me or like in front of me.”
P5: “It felt like dread…Yeah, like even before he came out of the
car there was this ominous feeling. Like I felt paranoid. I don’t
know how I knew somebody was watching me, but I had this
sensation that there was someone there watching me and it was
like, it was like paranoia.”
These quotes from participants one, three, four, and five share a sensation of anticipation of fear, apprehension. This is how the themes across participants were coded and analyzed.
Based on the author’s previous experience with the phenomenon and previous research on the subject, the author anticipated that one of the common themes across dreamers would be dreamer violence. Had themes been determined a priori, dreamer violence would likely be one of the themes of interest, but in pursuit of deepening the understanding of the experience of recurrent 38 dreams without interference from personal bias, all themes and findings emerged from the collected data. It is not possible to state that the author’s personal experience with recurrent dreams had no influence on the analysis and the data collection, but conscious efforts were made to limit that influence and remain grounded in the data.
There is a significant gap in the literature regarding the subjective experience of recurrent dreams and the potential significance of these dreams. Thus, a phenomenological approach was used in order to address this gap through in-depth exploration of the phenomenon.
39
Chapter 4: Results
Research Findings
This study analyzed the recurring dreams and qualitative interviews of six adults, four undergraduate students and two graduate level psychology students. Four participants were female and two were male, ranging in age from 18 to 29 (M=22). Four participants described themselves as Caucasian, one as Hispanic, and one as White/Hispanic. Each interview centered on a particular set of recurrent dreams, and associations to the dreams during the interview process were also analyzed. The recurrent dreams that were reported varied in age of onset, duration, and frequency. The dreams were reported retrospectively in a one-time interview. First, the emerging themes and the similarities and differences between participants’ dream series were analyzed, and second, the similarities and differences within each participant’s dream series were also explored. Personal identifying information such as names were changed or omitted in order to preserve the participants’ confidentiality.
The results of this study were organized in the following order: 1. Emergent Themes
Within Individual Dream Series, 2. Recurrent Dream Themes Across Participants, 3. Changes
Within Dream Series. Example quotes will be used to help illustrate the analytic process of arriving at these findings.
Emergent Themes Within Individual Dream Series
The following section will include the first dream in each participants’ recurrent dream series and the themes that were identified within each dream series and qualitative interview. The themes identified in this section include all the dreams that each participant reported during the interview. Many of the themes described in this section were also found across participants’ dream series (see next section). 40
P1 Dream: It was mostly when I was little, not so much now. I’ve had a few. Well, maybe like two, I think. Um. I used to have a dream where, as much as I can remember, it was mostly in my room with my mom and I don’t remember what we were talking about, but it’s always like me seeing myself, I’ve never like had a dream where I was, like it was me, I was always seeing myself. And then, we would be talking about it and she would be cleaning, and she is standing on like a stool by like my dresser and there was a clock. And like all of a sudden, I have a fear of bugs, and I don’t like any type of bugs, and like all of a sudden I would just see like a bunch of like spiders, like just crawling on the walls. And it would just be like everywhere and it would like scare me.
P1 Themes: Fear, sudden change, time, death, family, dread.
Fear:
“And like all of a sudden, I would just see like a bunch of spiders, like just crawling on
the walls. And it would just be like everywhere and it would scare me.”
Sudden change:
“It wasn’t like there was anything leading up to it, it was just us having a conversation
and then all of a sudden it just, you know, went bad kind of.”
Time:
“Like time kind of stopped. Like everything froze and I could see like everything, like
nobody was moving.”
Death:
“If I had a nightmare, it was basically something with my parents dying or something.”
Family:
“My parents were in the helicopter and it just exploded.” 41
Dread:
“And I feel like because I felt like I knew what was going to happen, it was like anxious,
like waiting, like when is it gonna happen?”
P2 Dream: I’m driving and I end up at the diner that my grandma was a waitress at, for like my whole childhood. And like in my dream I know that she has already passed on and I’m going there because I want to see her I guess. So, I go in and she is like standing behind the counter and, when I was little before I went to school, my mom would always bring me in and we would drink like a milkshake and eat something together. So, that’s like what was happening in the dream. And so, we are like sitting down and sometimes I can remember like what we talked about and other times when I wake up its kind of blurry. But we always talked about something that was currently like happening in my life, so like the first time that I had this dream was the night before my sweet 16, so she was talking to me about that. And asking me how everybody was and things like that, and I felt like she was coming to like visit me, I guess, I don’t know, I believe in those types of things, but yeah, so that was, and then I just woke up and it was like we never got to like finish the conversation. So, I think maybe why I keep having them is because we have like more to talk about so, that was the first time. And then, I had one around Christmas time that year, because Christmas was like her favorite holiday, she did it big.
P2 Themes: Mourning, family, important events, closure.
Mourning:
“But I feel like if I keep having them, like there is always gonna be something, at least I
hope, there is always gonna be something for us to talk about. So that I can keep having
them.” 42
“And like in my dream I know she has already passed on and im going there because I
want to see her I guess”
Family:
“About two and a half years ago my grandma passed away and I lived with her my entire
life, so I was very close with her.”
“We were really close, she was like another mom.”
Important events:
“She passed away about two months before my sweet 16, and the night before my sweet
16 was the first time that I ever had this dream.”
“We always talked about something that was currently happening in my life”
Closure:
“Then I just woke up and it was like we never got to like finish the conversation. So, I
think maybe I keep having them because we have like more to talk about.”
“So I never got to like talk to ger or say goodbye, so I feel like this is kind of like I’m
getting the chance to talk to her and tell her about the things that are going on in my life.”
P3 Dream: Okay, so basically it just jumps into the middle of like a story, basically. And
I’m in the kitchen making food and then I, it’s kind of dark, and my family is in the basement. But then I hear something, or feel like someone is watching me. And then my senses are correct because downstairs someone is in the basement, someone that my family doesn’t know and they are talking to, and threatening them, so then when I am done with my food I bring it down and I find that my family is not alive. And then when I see the guy, like who is in my basement, um, makes eye contact with me, and I run all the way upstairs into my parent’s room and jump out 43 the window. This big window, every time. And then I’m running on roofs and cars to get away from him, and as I run faster I start to fly (laughs) away from him, to get away from the guy.
P3 Themes: Death, dread, family, escaping, fear, crashes and amputations.
Death:
“So then when I am done with my food I bring it down and I find that my family is not
alive.”
Dread:
“Just a feeling that I had to get away because something was gonna happen to me”
Family:
And then my mom, my two sisters, and my cousin were there. And they weren’t crying, I
was the only person crying.
Escaping:
“And then I see the guy, like who is in my basement, um, makes eye contact with me, and
I run all the way upstairs into my parent’s room and jump out the window. The big
window, every time. And then I’m running on roofs and cars to get away from him, and
as I run faster I start to fly away from him, to get away from the guy.”
Fear:
“The first time, definitely it was fear, and that’s why I run so fast out of the big window.”
Crashes and Amputations:
“This was like a significant dream because I am afraid of roller coasters and there was a
roller coaster crash on the ride that I was on and I lost my legs.” 44
“But he was driving, and he has his head down looking at his phone and I knew that he
was gonna crash…when I pulled my dad out of the car because I thought he was okay, he
didn’t have a head on him.”
P4 Dream: Okay, um. Usually my dreams include like me running away from something or running toward something. So I had one dream that it was like maybe a month ago, and I was on a beach, and I wanted to get away from my family, like we were at the beach, but it was like one of those beaches that had like houses. So, I ran away, like by myself, and there was like a gate, like a wooden fence thing, and I walked through the fence and I like ran along this, like the side of a mountain cliff, and on the bottom of the cliff there was like the ocean. So I walked around the mountain and then there was like a cave and, the cave was filled with water but there was like an abandoned ship in the cave. So I went in the cave and, on the boat, and for most of the dream it was like me trying not to fall off the boat, and like I would have, like I notice in a lot of my dreams, like that dream, like I think I had it twice. But I noticed like that whole month I had a lot of dreams where there was water involved, and like me running away from something.
P4 Themes: Water, trapped, fear/helpless, dread, psychic equivalence.
Water:
“I had a lot of dreams where there was water involved, and like me running away from
something.”
“Her friends save her before the water goes in the well and she drowns.”
Trapped:
“A lot of my dreams also have like this trapped feeling. I think more trapped than running
away.” 45
Fear/helpless:
“Probably fear, because I feel like I cant get off the boat.”
“It was kind of dark out and I was by myself again, like in the woods. And there was like
a small creek and I think I was like scared because I was like, I don’t know where I am,
basically, and I’m by myself.”
Dread:
“But I’m kind of like crouching, almost lime im like suspiciously looking around, like
seeing if there is like anything behind me.”
“Like I think he was looking at me, but he was just staring at me, he wasn’t saying
anything and I was showing him the food I made. And he like had his hands behind his
back, I remember, and I think like I turned to run because I was like afraid of him.
Psychic Equivalence:
“And I think he had a knife and he wanted to like stab me, and I remember I woke up
with like a sharp pain in my back, like I actually felt it through the dream.”
P5 Dream: So, the first one. I remember walking. On a sidewalk. And there was like a wall on my right side. I don’t remember how tall it was but I think it was taller than me, it was over, it was higher than my head. And I had this weird feeling that, there was a car that was liked parked, facing, like facing the opposite direction that I was walking. And like it felt like there was a guy in the car who was like watching me. And so as I was walking, I started to, I don’t remember when I started walking faster or trying to walk faster, but the guy basically came out of the car, and he was wearing like a hood, and he was like dressed in black. And he started following me. And at some point I got scared and started trying to run. But I couldn’t run, my 46 legs were like almost like cement. The more I tried to run, I was like heavy and I couldn’t run.
And then like, I woke up. I don’t remember, I remember somebody running after me, I don’t remember what, if he had a weapon, or something like that. I remember not being able to run, my legs were like heavy.
P5 Themes: Death, dread, psychic equivalence, chased/escaping, paralysis, fear/helplessness.
Death:
“And the second gun I picked up, I feel like it was by a dead body.”
Dread:
“It felt like dread…yeah, like even before I, before he came out of the car there was this
ominous feeling. Like I felt paranoid. ”
Psychic Equivalence:
“It was like this white face with like hair on it and like I thought that it was like I was
about to get killed.”
Chased/escaping:
“And he started following me…I remember somebody running after me.”
“And I was afraid and I started running too.”
Paralysis:
“But I couldn’t run, my legs were like almost like cement.”
“It was like running like through snow…I was able to run, but it was sort of inhibited.”
“I realized that my hearing was being muffled…I wouldn’t be able to hear if he was
sneaking up on me.”
Fear/Helplessness: 47
“I was in the car in the passenger seat and my brother was driving…and I was like telling
him to like slow down, slow down, slow down, and like he wouldn’t listen to me. And
then he, the car was like bouncing and like, like and veering and then like it went over the
cliff and I woke up.”
P6 Dream: So, um, it was about, um, a relationship I was in at the time. Um, and the first one was probably I think like a few weeks after we started dating. And, um, so, okay. So, okay. So
I was in, um, a car and I was with a guy, someone, someone else. And um, so the first time it sort of changed the first time it was my previous boyfriend. And then over the course of the dream, it sort of shifted into just being kind of like a, like unknown person, throughout the dream series.
Okay. Yeah. Um, and so I would be, I was driving along and he was in the car with me and we were sort of talking when we were laughing and it felt really like fun and like happy and exciting.
Um, and then I would realize, I would like remember in a moment that I was dating this other guy and I would feel like this overwhelming sense of guilt, um, like I was cheating on him basically. Um, and it was like, this was like always, it's like scary moment in this realization and then I would feel this guilt and that was it. And sometimes the content kind of shifted a bit like throughout the dream series. Um, but it was always the same thing where I was with someone else having sort of no consciousness of the fact that I was dating my boyfriend at the time. And then I would like remember in a flash and I would feel guilty.
P6 Themes: Ending/Closure, collapse of time/person, chased/escaping, guilt.
Ending/Closure:
“I think I was, I like made peace with breaking up with the bad one, but it was harder to
break up with the good one.” 48
“I was laying in my bed and I had recently broken up with him and then I like realized in
a flash that I had only broken up with like half of him and had forgotten to tell the other
half.”
Collapse of time/person:
“And sometimes it was kind of like an abbreviated version.”
“They were actually the same person.”
Chased/escaping:
“It was horrifying. It was like I was in this like big building and there were like monsters
running around or something and I went and like ran up to the roof.”
Guilt:
“And I think that, I think that I was feeling guilty, that I wished he was different, and
then, and I was having a hard time making sense of it all.”
“I think it was this feeling of panic again. Like I remember thinking, Oh my God, like I
forgot, I forgot to tell him, like he is gonna be wondering why I am not calling. And like,
you know, it was that feeling of betrayal again. ”
“I’ve forgotten something important and it’s going to hurt someone.”
Recurrent Dream Themes Across Participants
The following are the themes that were identified as relevant in two or more of the participants’ dream series.
1. Death
Six of the six participants (100%) reported recurrent dreams or associations to them that contained the theme of death and dying. This was the most common recurrent dream theme. 49
Examples of the characteristics of these dreams included the dreamer being in danger of dying or being killed, family members that have died because of old age, family members that were murdered, and the presence of dead bodies and undead beings such as zombies.
Four of the six participants (66%) had recurrent dreams that included the death or possible death of a family member. One of P1’s recurrent nightmares included the spectacular death of her parents who were aboard an exploding helicopter over a war-torn city. P3’s dreams were particularly graphic and violent, as she dreamt that her family was brutally murdered by an intruder in her basement while she was upstairs cooking a meal. P3 would continue to say that
“I find that my family is not alive…they are basically just like on
the floor, in blood.”
Additionally, P3 would have recurrent dreams about her father being decapitated in a preventable car crash because he was looking at his phone and he could not hear her pleas to stop texting and driving. P6 had a dream in which she is chased by a monster and would run up to the roof to find her mother, and although she looked intact, she would find that her mother was dead and it included a feeling of desperation portrayed by the following statement:
“I went and like ran up to the roof and my mom was there and I
think she was dead but I wasn’t sure. It was like this awful feeling
of like, are you in there?”
In contrast to the violent murders and accidents described above, P2’s recurrent dreams involved her already deceased grandmother. In her dreams, she would know that her grandmother had passed, would have a pleasant conversation with her usually related to the current events of her life, and P2 would become upset upon waking and remembering she can no longer have these conversations with her grandmother, portrayed in her statement below: 50
“Then I just woke up and it was like we never got to like finish the
conversation.”
Finally, P3, P4, and P5 had dreams in which they themselves were in danger of being killed. These will also be described in the themes of Fear/Imminent Threat and Being Watched or Chased/Running Away below. For P3, the threat to her own life came immediately after she discovered her family had been murdered, and the intruder was now looking at her. P4 had a dream in which a woman (possibly herself) was being mutilated and cut open, and another dream in which she was stabbed in the back while running away from the assailant. P5 had multiple dreams, both recurrent and one-time dreams, in which he is being hunted by monstrous and undead beings and he has to escape or fight for his life. Additionally, in one of his recurrent dreams, P5 would attempt to fight back and run into dead bodies as described below:
“And the second gun that I picked up, I feel like it was by a dead
body. I wasn’t sure if I was making that up but I feel like it was
like dead, like somebody got shot or something and their gun was
there…like a casualty of whatever was going on. ”
2. Mourning/Closure
Two of the six participants (33%) had recurrent dreams surrounding the theme of mourning. As first described above, P2 had recurrent dreams of seeing and speaking to her deceased grandmother. Although she welcomes these dreams, as it gives her an opportunity to reunite, albeit in her unconscious, with her grandmother, there was also a feeling of sadness and grief upon waking. Her wish to continue her relationship with her grandmother is demonstrated in the following statement: 51
“But I feel like I keep having them [the dreams], like there is
always gonna be something, at least I hope, there is always gonna
be something for us to talk about. So that I can keep having them.”
Additionally, her wish to keep her grandmother alive is evident in the fact that when she has these dreams, they tend to talk about something that was currently happening in her life around the time of each dream. For example:
“So like the first time that I had this dream was the night before my
sweet 16, so she was talking to me about that. And asking how
everybody was and things like that, and I felt like she was coming
to like visit me, I guess, I don’t know.”
P2 also reported having had this dream around Christmas, around the time of her junior prom, around the time her grandmother’s birthday as well as her own, and also around her high school graduation. Seemingly, important events in her life triggered her dreams as she tried to connect with a very significant figure in her life. Reportedly, her dreams were always exactly the same except for the topics that they would talk about. P2 understand her dreams as closure because in her real life she was unable to say goodbye as explained in the following statement:
“Well, she was in the hospital for a while, like I wanna say maybe
2 or 3 months before she passed…And when we got the call that
she had coded in the hospital and they were able to bring her back,
me and my mom were on vacation. So, we left that night and drove
home and by the time we got there she was on a ventilator, so I
never got to talk to her or say goodbye. So I feel like this is kind of 52
like I’m getting the chance to talk to her and tell her about the
things that are going on in my life. ”
P6 had a couple of long series of recurrent dreams about her previous boyfriend. There was not death involved, but it seemed to be about mourning and providing closure for a significant relationship that had ended. In the second set of recurrent dreams that she reported, she would dream that she had broken up with half of her boyfriend, but had forgotten to tell the other half. She described significant ambivalence about that relationship, describing several qualities about her boyfriend that she liked, and several that were very problematic. She understood this dream as follows:
“I think, I think I was, I like made my peace with breaking up with
the bad one, but it was harder to break up with a good one.”
In these dreams, P6 would be overcome with guilt about having forgotten to break up with half of her ex-boyfriend. This guilt was also a prominent theme in her first set of recurrent dreams in which she would be driving along with someone and having a great time, talking and laughing, and all of a sudden she would remember that she was actually dating someone else, this ex-boyfriend, and she would feel an overwhelming sense of guilt because she would realize she is cheating on him. P6 understood her recurrent dreams as an attempt to arrive at a sense of closure, that the relationship was really over, and that she had indeed broken up with all of him and it was time to move on.
3. Dread
Four of the six participants (66%) experienced the feeling of dread in their dreams. Dread is related to anxious feelings in that it is a sensation of apprehension or fear about what is to 53 come. One of P1’s set of recurrent dreams was filled with a diffuse dread that something terrible was going to happen to her. She had a fear of bugs and there was an anticipation that bugs would show up. She had these dreams five or six times, and because she had already experienced them, she stated the following regarding her experience of dread:
“Like subconsciously, I knew that I have seen this dream before.
And I was just waiting for like the scary part…and I feel like
because I felt like I knew what was going to happen, it was like
anxious, like waiting, like when is it gonna happen?”
There was an added element symbolizing anxiety and dread in this dream represented by a clock on the wall. This dream took place in her real-life bedroom and she reported that everything was exactly the same except this clock, which in real-life was a flower-shaped ticking clock on the wall behind her bed, but in the dream it was a “regular clock” and it was placed on a different wall in her room, by a dresser decorated with snow globes. This clock elicited anxiety in P1 both in her dream and in her real-life. She described this experience with the following statement:
“And I feel like the ticking kind of scared me a little bit. Because
it’s very like, I feel like, it’s like anxious, like I feel like there’s
something that you are like waiting for.”
P3’s sets of recurrent dreams also included an anticipatory fear that can be understood as dread. In her first set of dreams, she is cooking in the kitchen and begins to have a sensation that something is wrong, that her family might be in danger downstairs in the basement. Interestingly, she waits until she is done making her food and then goes down to find her family has been 54 murdered. She goes on to describe that in subsequent series of the dream, and unlike the first time she had the dream, she would run away before she would see the assailant because she had
“a feeling that I had to get away because something was gonna
happen to me.”
In P3’s second set of recurrent dreams, she is chasing after her father who is texting and driving in a desperate attempt to get him to watch the road. Below is her description of her attempt to warn her father to no avail.
“But he was driving it, and he has his head down looking at his
phone and I knew that he was gonna crash, so I was running down
the block chasing him, telling him to stop texting and driving even
though he couldn’t hear me.”
P4 described various dreams in which she is alone, walking around eerie, dark, and potentially dangerous landscapes. Feeling like something bad might happen, she shares that while she is walking in these dreams, she begins
“crouching, almost like I’m like suspiciously like looking around,
like seeing if there is like anything behind me or like in front of
me.”
The expectation of fear and the anticipation that something terrible will soon happen is very clearly experienced and described by P5. P5 has a set of recurrent dreams in which he is being watched and chased. In the first iteration of said set of dreams, he described the following:
“It felt like dread…Yeah, like even before he came out of the car
there was this ominous feeling. Like I felt paranoid. I don’t know
how I knew somebody was watching me, but I had this sensation 55
that there was someone there watching me and it was like, it was
like paranoia.”
Furthermore, he adds than in his second set of recurrent dreams where there is a man that is hunting him down and trying to kill him, he
“realized at some point that I was like hyper aware to try to like be
wary of like him coming.”
This feeling of paranoia and hyperawareness was exacerbated in this dream by the fact that he realized his hearing is muffled and he will not be able to hear him coming. This experience of being muffled or paralyzed was also prevalent among the recurrent dreamers and will be further described below under the theme of paralysis.
4. Being Watched/Chased
Five of the six participants (83%) experienced the ominous feeling of being watched and/or the distress of being chased. Studies have repeatedly shown that being watched or chased is one of the most common dream themes (Gauchat et al., 2015; Hartmann, 2001; Yu, 2016a;
Zadra et al., 2006). Out of the five participants’ whose recurrent dreams included this theme, four had the experienced that they alone were being watched or chased. P5 experienced both being chased while alone and with family in different series of his dream, and P1 was with others when she felt she was being watched. P1 was initially with her family in her dream and “people were looking for [them]” until she got separated from them. P6 had a set of dreams in her early childhood in which a monster was running after her and she ran up to the roof to find her mother.
For P3, P4, and P5, being chased was the most frequent and prevalent theme in their series of dreams. For example, in P3’s dream, after realizing her family has been killed, she immediately begins to run away from the person that had killed them and reports jumping out of 56 a window to escape and then running faster and faster to the point where she started flying away.
She has a similar dream in which she is at a house party and realizes that there is someone who is threatening the guests, and again as the man begins to approach, she jumps out of a window and runs away. In addition, before being chased in one of her dreams, she has the feeling that someone is watching her despite the fact that she has not seen anyone actually watching her.
P4 begins the research interview by stating the following:
“Usually my dreams include me like running away from something
or running towards something.”
For P4, escaping is a part of her main themes whether or not she is actively being chased.
For example, one of her set of recurrent dreams includes her being stuck in a dangerous boat in very choppy waters and she needs to figure out how to escape. In another set of recurrent dreams, the danger is more explicitly associated with an other as described below:
“Like I think he was like looking at me, but he was just staring at
me, he wasn’t saying anything and I was showing him the food I
made. And he had his hand behind his back, I remember, and I
think I like turned to run away because I was like afraid of him.
And, I think he had a knife and he wanted to stab me.”
P5 was either watched, chased, or hunter in almost all of his reported dreams. In the initial iteration of his first set of recurrent dreams, he has the experience that someone is watching him, and this someone materializes and begins to chase him as he runs away. In the second series of this set of dreams, he is walking and realizes that people are running in the opposite direction, and in fear, he follows the crown and runs away towards the direction he was coming from. Lastly, in the third iteration of this dream, he is walking with his wife and kid in a 57 tunnel and realizes that two large animals are charging towards them. They begin to run and move out of the way and are relieved that the animals charge past them and that they were not the target. Below will be a section that focuses specifically on the changes within a recurrent dream series, such as how P5 was first chased by a man, then a monster-like being, and lastly two large animals. Also of interest is that in the last iteration of that dream he is not the target while in the first two he was. Associating to this set of recurrent dreams, P5 recalls a dream in which he is being hunted from above by a man with a rifle and he tries to hide.
5. Paralysis
Three of the six participants (50%) experienced some form of paralysis or inhibited movement or action. Throughout the interview process, P3 recalled an earlier set of recurrent dreams in which she would get on a roller coaster, which she was afraid of in real life, and the roller coaster would crash. In the crash, she would injure herself and lose her legs. As her friends help her out of the roller coaster, she realizes her feet are now replaced by boxes as and they try to run away. Her boxed feet, although allowing her to get away, were also experienced as inhibiting her movement and making the escape more difficult.
P4 recounted a dream in which there was a couple and their house was being robbed. She is unsure in the retelling of this dream of whether or not she was the woman in the dream. This couple’s movement is inhibited quite literally as the burglars tie them up, and her attempt to get up and escape were futile because she could not move. She continued to report that:
“the burglars started like cutting her open and I remember like in
the dream I was like paralyzed, but I don’t know if I was the
woman or if I was watching, I feel like I was the woman 58
though…but I couldn’t get out of the dream and the finally I woke
up. So, I was paralyzed in the dream.”
For P5, the theme of paralysis was pervasive. In the first iteration of the recurrent dream in which he is being chased, he realizes that the man who was watching him is now walking towards him and the following ensues:
“At some point I got scared and started trying to run. But I couldn’t
run, my legs were like almost like cement. The more I tried to run,
I was like heavy and I couldn’t run.”
In the second set in that series of dreams, P5 recalls being chased by a large, monstrous, white being, and again he was unable to freely run. Although he reports more freedom of movement than in the previous dream in that series, the experience was as described below:
“I started running in the other direction, where everyone else was
running. And I just remembered this, it was like running like
through snow. Like I was like, I had to like kinda jump to get over
the snow. So like, I was able to run, but it was sort of inhibited, my
running.”
Lastly, for P5, he experienced a different form of paralysis in the second set of recurrent dreams described. More of a paralysis of the senses. This is the dream series in which he is being hunted by a man from above. As he tries to hide, the following takes place:
“But then in the dream I like, I realized that my hearing was being
muffled by something so I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be able to hear if he
was sneaking up on me, that my hearing was being muffled. And
also I couldn’t see.” 59
In this dream, although not physically restrained or unable to move, he was not able to see or hear well making it much more difficult to effectively evade the dangerous situation. His senses and awareness of his surroundings was blocked to the point where both moving and not moving were dangerous.
6. Psychic Equivalence
The mode of psychic equivalence was first introduced by Peter Fonagy (1995). It is understood as a mental state that precedes the achievement of mentalization, and it is characterized by the experience that everything is “for real.” That the internal and external worlds are isomorphic and indistinguishable. The mode of psychic equivalence can often be seen in the experience of children who awake from nightmares and believe that what they dreamt is real, and the fear can only be abated by the presence of another person, another mind.
Three of the six participants (50%) in this study experienced momentary psychic equivalence upon waking from their recurrent dreams. This mode of thinking tends to last only a few seconds in adults, but the experience can be powerful. The clearest example was provided by
P4 in the dream in which she is running away from a man who wants to stab her with a knife.
The interaction during the interview was as follows:
P4: “And he like had his hand behind his back, I remember, and I
think like I turned to run away because I was afraid of him. And, I
think he had a knife and he wanted to like stab me, and I remember
I woke up with like a sharp pain in my back like I actually felt it
through the dream.”
Interviewer: “So you actually got stabbed in the dream?”
P4: “Yeah, and I felt it when I woke up.” 60
She then goes on to speculate that perhaps she felt a pain because she was sleeping in a painful position, but nonetheless, her experience upon waking was that she had actually been stabbed in the back by the man in her dream.
P1 had the experience of waking up from the recurrent nightmare that her parents had been killed and for a brief moment experiencing that fear and the painful sadness as real. The following two statements describe that experience:
“Um, I feel like it was mostly fear. I feel like it was more, not like
the dream was real, but the fear was real. I wouldn’t want that to
happen now.”
And,
“I think they were all the same, they all had like similar events that
happened and it just led up to that one part. And I know I would
feel myself crying. Um, and that scared me because it almost felt
real, like it felt like it was really happening.”
Lastly, P5 had the terrifying experience of opening his eyes and having the fear of his nightmare follow him into wakefulness momentarily. When he was having the dream where he was being hunted from a above by a man in a rifle, he was also experiencing added anxiety by having hear hearing muffled and an inability to open his eyes. He forced himself to open his eyes, in real life, only to confuse a mannequin with a wig that was in his room with the man in his dreams who was trying to kill him. In those few seconds, the man in his dream and the mannequin in his room where one and the same.
7. Collapse of Time 61
Four of the six participants (66%) experience a collapse of time in their series of recurrent dreams. Some experience the collapse of time within a dream, and some in relation to previous iterations. A collapse of time is defined in this case as time experienced differently from waking life.
For P1, time was a significant theme in the first set of recurrent dreams described and was symbolized by the presence of a clock. In her dream, she would be on her bed looking at her mother who was cleaning the dresser in her room. The clock that in reality was behind the bed was now next to the dresser, by the mother, and then all of a sudden there would be an infestation of bugs and spiders all over the room and all over her. The clock was different than the one in real life in its shape and placement within the room. In addition, the clock in real life was always ticking, a source of actual anxiety for P1, but in the dream there was no ticking. This could be understood as time having stopped, or running out of time, among other possible interpretations. The following is her description of her experience of time in the first version of her recurrent dream.
“But I remember I was on my bed and then I was like looking up at
her, and she is cleaning, and then all of a sudden you could feel, it
just starts…it was more like time kind of stopped. Like everything
froze and I could see like everything, like nobody was moving.”
Then, in subsequent versions of her dream, there is an added anxiety of knowing that something bad is going to happen because she has the feeling that she has lived it before. The experience was as follows:
“And I felt like because I knew what was going to happen, it was
like anxious, like waiting, like when is it gonna happen? I know its 62
gonna happen, I just don’t know when. And then, that’s when kind
of the fear sets in. Because like I said, everything stopped. So
when everything stopped. It’s just like more and more, I guess
that’s what scared me. ”
The following examples of collapse of time were less about the experience of a dream itself and more about the experienced changes in felt time through the different dream version within a recurrent series. P3, P4, and P6 demonstrate this experience with the following statements:
P3: “Okay, so basically it jumps into the middle of like a story.”
P4: “I think in the second, the second time, the part where I was
like walking through like the beach, past the gate onto the cliff, I
think it was like shortened. And I kind of just sped up.”
P6: “And sometimes it was kind of like an abbreviated version,.
But it was clearly sort of the same thing.”
8. Fear/Helplessness
Four of the six participants (66%) had recurrent dreams in which they experienced fear and helplessness. Although similar to the theme of dread, this experience of fear and/or helplessness is not an anxiety about what is to come, but a feeling that is experienced in the moment. The fear is often caused by the experience of being helpless in the situation the dreamer is in. There is a passivity that appears to be elemental in the intensity of the fear of the situation, a lack of agency that engenders a feeling of helplessness evidenced by phrases such as “I’m all by myself,” “I couldn’t do anything about it,” and “all of a sudden.” 63
P1 describes a recurrent dream in which she is in her childhood bedroom while her mother is cleaning her room, and all of a sudden, she and her mother would be overwhelmed by spiders all over the room, crawling on the walls. She continues to say that she is afraid of all kinds of bugs, and the fear of the suddenness and pervasiveness of the invasion is overwhelming.
P3 describes feeling terrified and helpless at the sight of her family having been murdered by an intruder and her being left alone with the intruder in the house. Both of these dreams include the presence of family and an intrusion that leaves them helpless and vulnerable. A difference between these dreams is that P1 is paralyzed by the overwhelming intrusion, while P3 is more active by running away. P1’s recurrent series changes very slightly over time, while P3’s includes various sequences that indicate a decrease in the intensity of the fear over time, to be discussed in more detail in section below (Changes Within Dream Series).
P4 describes different instances in which she feels fearful and helpless in her recurrent dreams. In the main recurrent dream that she reports, she finds herself on an abandoned ship inside a cave filled with active and dangerous waters. She reports feeling trapped and afraid because she cannot get off the boat, and as the boat rocks in the crashing waves, all she can do it try not to fall off. The added element of her conscious fear of deep water and her concern of not being a very good swimmer permeate into the fear felt in the dream. P4 describes another dream in which a girl is stuck in a well, and unless she is saved by her friends quickly, she will drown in the rising water. There theme of being helplessly trapped is consistent with the previous dream. Finally, she reports another recurrent dream in which she finds herself completely alone in the woods, not knowing where she is or how she got there. There is a small creek that she begins to follow with the hope that it will lead her to safety. In this last dream, she is not helplessly trapped as in the previous dreams, but she is alone and afraid, but takes the active role 64 of trying to find a way out. All three of these dreams have in common the theme of fear, but also the presence of water. In the first two dreams the water is the main source of fear and danger, while in the third dream the water is potentially leading her to safety. Finally, P4 recalls that in the boat dream where she felt stuck, terrified, and helpless, she would in the end get off the boat and walk back to the safety of the beach. She does not recall the action of getting off the boat, but recalls being on the boat scared, and then, later, being back on land and walking back.
P5 had fear and helplessness as main themes in most of his reported dreams. The first series of dreams reported by P5 include significant fear, but not helplessness. In these dreams he is typically being chased and finds ways to take action, running away, moving out of the way, or fighting back. He then reports a series of dreams in which he is being hunted by a man in his house, and the fear is exacerbated by the helpless feeling of not being able to move, see, or hear properly. The inability to act seemed to increase the felt fear. He then describes two dreams in which he feels helpless and out of control. In the first one, he is on a floating mattress that keeps getting higher and higher. He reported being very scared as the mattress was getting too high and he couldn’t do anything about it. Finally, he reports a dream in which he is in the passenger seat of a car and his older brother is driving too fast. He tries to tell his brother to slow down and his brother seems to not hear him and the car veers off and drives over a cliff, leading to P5 waking up in fear for his life. The way that P5 describes his dreams suggests that in the dreams in which he is able to take action, the more action he can take, the more in control he becomes and the less fear he feels. For example, in the recurrent dreams in which he is being chased, he is less afraid in the dream in which he picks up a weapon and shoots back than in the dream in which he is solely running away.
9. Family and Friends 65
Six of the six participants (100%) had recurrent dreams that included their family members or close/significant relationships. Interestingly, in all of the participants’ dreams, their family members/significant others were either dead, unable to help, or the main source of distress. P1 dreamt that her mother was surrounded by spiders just like she was in her first recurrent dream series. In the second series she reported, she would see the helicopter that her parents were supposed to be in explode. She added the following statement summing this up:
“If I had a nightmare, it was basically with my parents dying or
something.”
P2’s recurrent dream series was about visiting her deceased grandmother. In P3’s recurrent dream series, she would find her family had been murdered, leaving her alone to escape the intruder that had committed these crimes. She also had dreams of her father being decapitated in a car accident. P4’s recurrent dream series about being stuck on a dangerous, rocking boat would end with her mother yelling at her asking where she had been. P5 had the dream of his brother driving them off a cliff and not listening to his pleas to slow down. Finally, P6’s recurrent dream was about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, with the end of the relationship as the main source of distress. Additionally, P6 recalled a childhood recurrent nightmare in which she was chased by a monster and feared her mother was dead.
Surprisingly, where family members could not help alleviate the fear or stress induced in the dream, friends were often there to help. For example, P3’s dreams of being chased by the person who killed her family, and in subsequent versions of the dream, would also kill party goers at the house party P3 was at, her friends helped her escape out of a window. Additionally, in a dream in which she is involved in a roller coaster crash, it is her friends who help her off it 66 and help her get away. In P4’s associations to her dreams, she talks about a girl who is trapped in a well and she can only be saved by her friends.
Changes Within Dream Series
This section will analyze the similarities and differences in the manifestation of dreams within each participant’s recurrent dream series. Particular attention will be paid to the intensity of the feelings within the dream as well as the actions taken by the dreamer in each version of the dream series.
P1:
P1 reported two sets of recurrent dreams that took place around the same time when she was approximately 12 years old. P1 was 19 years old at the time of the interview. The first dream she recalled was set in her bedroom. Most everything was in the right place, her bedroom looked the same as in waking life. The main difference was that the flower-shaped clock that she had on the wall behind her bed in real life was replaced by a “normal” clock, and instead of being behind her, it was by her dresser, close to where her mother stood dusting between P1’s decorative snow globes and family pictures. P1 reported that she had asthma and so her mother would frequently clean and dust her room for her well-being. In the dream, time stops, and all of a sudden, the room in crawling with spiders, quickly filling up the volume of the bedroom, on her walls, ceiling, bed, and on both her and her mother. In terror, this is the point in the dream when she would wake up. She reported having this dream five or six times, and was unable to remember if there were any particular differences in the different versions of this dream series. 67
The one difference that she recalls was about the way she felt in the dream, rather than what was actually taking place. She said that after having experienced that dream, in subsequent versions, there would be some added anxiety in the form of dread as explained in this statement:
Interviewer: “So that was the main difference from real life to the
dream…the clock was somewhere else, it was next to your mom, it
was a normal clock, and it didn’t make a ticking noise. But you
still felt that anxiety of something coming?”
P1: “Mhm, yeah. Because I feel like I, like subconsciously, I knew
that I have seen this dream before. And I was just waiting for like
the scary part.”
In the first couple of versions of this dream, the dominant emotion was fear. In subsequent versions, although fear was very much present, especially by the end of the dream, the dominant emotion was dread. Rather than fear itself, the most powerful emotion was the anticipation of the fear. Through all five or six versions of this nightmare, P1’s dream ego actions within the series remain the same. More accurately, they are inactions, as she is helplessly overwhelmed by a swarm of insects and remains in a passive role throughout the dream series.
P1’s second set of recurrent dreams happened around the same time in her life, and reoccurred at least three times. She was unable to recall if there were any significant life events around that time, and like the first series reported, she could not remember many details, making it difficult to determine if there were changes within the dream series. In this dream, P1 recalls being in a war-like New York City, where people were fighting, the sky was red and dark, and she had the feeling that people were chasing her. She described the tone as feeling like the world 68 was ending. She then remembers hearing helicopters, standing below a hotel awning, and looking up at the sky. She somehow knows that her parents are in one of those helicopters, and as she realizes this, she watches that helicopter explode in the sky. She would then be overcome by the realization that her parents were dead and she was alone, and would start crying. After waking up, she would have the feeling that she had actually cried, not just in the dream, but in reality. Unlike the first set of recurrent dreams described, she does not recall having the feeling, within this series of dreams, that she had had this dream before, and instead of anxiously awaiting for something to suddenly go wrong, she would be shocked and surprised in every iteration of this recurrent nightmare.
Considering her father’s time in the NYPD, including during 9/11, and her mother’s past as a flight attendant, in conjunction with a helicopter explosion, one could arrive at the interpretation that P1’s second set of recurrent dreams can be related to the generational trauma of the 2001 terrorist attack, and a paralyzing fear of being left alone and unprotected. In the first dream, her mother is trying to clean her room to protect her from her asthma, but is unable to protect her from the spider invasion. In the second dream, both her parents die and leave her alone to fend for herself in a war-torn city. Fear and helplessness seem to be themes that connect both her recurrent dreams. Her dream ego is unable to take any action that ameliorates the situation or change the outcome of the dreams despite the numerous iterations.
Based on Jung, Hartmann, Bion, and Ogden’s theories, the repetitive and unchanging nature of these dreams indicate some type of emotional or developmental arrest, or an emotional experience that is not able to be fully processed and integrated. This suggests, according to these theories and this author’s view of dreaming, that over the period of time that these dreams were taking place, P1 was unable to move towards resolving the issues that these dreams represented, 69 and the feeling of helplessness and fear of being unprotected remained as significant preoccupations. According to TST, however, these dreams would function as threat simulations of potential life events, and this would be P1’s attempt to prepare for the eventuality of having to fend for herself.
P2:
P2 reported a recurrent dream series in which she visits her deceased grandmother at her former place of work. The dream begins with P2 driving and arriving at the diner where her grandmother used to work as a waitress throughout P2’s childhood. In her waking life, P2’s mom would take her to the diner before school where they would have breakfast together and enjoy a milkshake while her grandmother worked and chatted with them. In the dream, she arrives at the diner and is aware that in real-life her grandmother has died. However, the experience is as if she were alive and her grandmother greets her from behind the counter and they chat like they used to back when she was alive. She reportedly had this dream at least eight times, and each time, although the majority of the dream remains almost identical in each iteration, the topic of conversation is what changes from dream to dream.
P2 reported that the topic of conversation in each version of the recurrent series was related to important events going on in her life at the time of each dream. For example, the first time she had this dream was the night before P2’s Sweet 16, so that is what they were talking about in the dream. P2’s grandmother had passed about two months prior to her Sweet 16, and two and a half years before the time of this interview. The two were very close and lived together for P2’s whole life. P2’s grandmother was a very important to her, calling her a second mom.
The second time she had the dream was during Christmas of that same year, reportedly her grandmother’s favorite holiday. She remembers talking about Christmas, about how her mom 70 is doing, and about their dog. She would ask how everybody in her life is doing and then P2 would wake up, with the conversation seemingly unfinished. She reported that the conversations were unfinished in all of her dreams and wondered if that is why she continues to have these dreams, because something is still unfinished. The third time was around the time of her junior prom, and that was the only difference in what they talked about compared to the previous two dreams. The following dream took place when P2 was beginning her senior year, and the next around her grandmother’s birthday. The sixth version was around the time of her graduation, the seventh was around her own birthday, and the last, up to the point of this interview, was in the beginning of her college career, “starting a new chapter.”
P2 added that she was on vacation with her mother when they got the call that her grandmother had coded in the hospital, and although they rushed back, by the time she got to the hospital her grandmother was on a ventilator and she never got to say goodbye. She believes that she is getting the chance to say goodbye through these dreams.
Regarding the emotions felt in the dream, P2 described the beginning of the dream as exciting because she knew she got to see her grandmother again, and that as the dream went on, things just felt normal, “it’s like just a comfortable feeling.” Then, upon waking, she becomes upset at the immediate realization that it was a dream, and that her grandmother is not alive and she cannot have these conversations that were so important to her. She reported feeling more connected to her grandmother on the days following these dreams. Despite her sadness upon waking, she enjoys having these dreams and looks forward to the next time they recur.
P2’s recurrent dream series is the only one out of all the participants in which the dream itself is not distressing. Rather, the distressing event occurs upon waking and realizing it was just a dream. However, as she had these dreams over time, the sadness felt when waking diminished 71 and she was able to maintain this felt connection with her grandmother for the next few days.
Additionally, she takes an active role in the dream by driving to the diner and going to see her grandmother in order to talk to her. She feels that there is still more to say to her and that this is the reason she keeps on having these dreams. She reported being surprised at the consistency of the details and the sequence of events in the dreams, and about the fact that what changes from dream to dream is the topic of conversation. The topic of conversation is about a significant event that is taking place in her life and through these dreams she is able to share them with a significant person in her life.
P3:
P3’s reported a main recurrent dream series that she remembered having had about once every two months for the two years leading up to this interview. In addition, she reported two additional dreams that she associated to this dream series, one occurring before and one after the onset of the main recurrent dream series.
This recurrent dream series begins with P3 making pasta in her kitchen. As she was cooking, the scene was dark and her family was downstairs in the basement of the house. She then hears something and has a feeling that someone is watching her. She realizes that someone is in her basement talking to her family, someone who the family does not know, and this someone is threatening her family. When she finishes making her pasta, she goes downstairs and finds that her family has been murdered by this stranger and are all on the floor covered in blood.
Then she sees this stranger, dressed in all black and wearing a hood, and is overcome by fear as they make eye contact, although she never sees his face, and she runs all the way upstairs to her parents’ bedroom and jumps out the big window in their room to escape. She makes her way down to safety by running on the roofs of the neighboring houses, then on the cars on the street, 72 and as she begins to run faster and faster, she actually starts to fly away to get away from the stranger who is chasing her. This is how the dream ends, with her running/flying away, never caught.
The last time she had this dream was three weeks before the interview. She recalled that she was cooking something in her kitchen and that she heard her parents in the basement.
However, this time, she does not remember seeing the stranger, she just remembers running away. Her own understanding of this difference in her dreams is that she experienced this, in the dream, as some sort of repeated event and that even without seeing the stranger, she knew she was in danger and had to run. She runs all the way up to her parents’ bedroom like in the previous dreams, but, in this iteration, instead of jumping out of her parents’ big window, she jumps out of a smaller window in the bedroom closet. She recalls jumping out and running on roofs and cars, and eventually flying away. Although she continued to escape, she does not remember that anyone was actually chasing her.
In addition to the diminishing size of the window from which she escapes, there were other interesting difference within the different versions of the dream. She recalls that the height of the jump was also getting shorter. Although she was still jumping from her window to the roof and then to other roofs and cars, the experience of the jump was different. She explains this experience with the following statement:
“the first time I did it felt like a longer drop down, and maybe I
thought I wasn’t gonna make it. But the second time or the last
time it happened, when it was from the smaller window, and I
didn’t see the guy, it was a shorter drop. Or maybe I thought it was
because I knew what was gonna happen.” 73
She also recalls another version of the dream in which instead of being in her own house, she is at a house party. She remembers being in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, when she learns that a stranger entered the house and is threatening the people downstairs. She is not sure whether anyone was murdered downstairs, but as she hears him coming up and approaching the bathroom she is hiding in with two friends, she jumps out of the same type of window that was in her parents’ closet, the smaller window. This time, however, the two friends she was hiding with are outside and are helping her get out of the window and run away. She states that they did not fly, just escaped by running away.
From these reported changes within her dreams, there is a sensation of her having learned from past experiences in this dream series. That the same exact cues are not needed for action to take place. Once she heard something happening in the basement, she did not need to go down and see that her family had been murdered and that there was a threatening stranger waiting for her. She seemed to have incorporated her previous experience of this dream and more quickly sprang into action and tried to escape. In order to assess and understand what her dominant emotion was in the dream, the following exchange took place.
P3: “The first time, definitely it was fear, and that’s why I run so
fast out of the big window. But then the other times, it felt kind of
normal.”
Interviewer: “Hmm”
P3: “Maybe, I don’t know. I just think it was maybe like routine
for me to run away. And that’s why I think each time , even though
I didn’t see the guy, I ran fast. I don’t know.” 74
Interviewer: “Like you knew what was going to happen, but you
didn’t have to wait for it. But you were still running away. So
while you are running away, what do you think, normal is not a
feeling, so I am wondering what do you think you were feeling
then?”
P3: “Umm, just a feeling that I had to get away because something
was gonna happen to me. But there is less panic.”
Similarly to the experience of P1, the dominant emotion in the first versions of the series is more explicitly fear/terror, while in subsequent versions of the dream the intensity of the fear is somewhat diminished, and the dominant emotion seems to move towards dread/anxiety. Once again, the fear is replaced by the anticipation of fear. In this case, unlike the dreams in P1, the dreamer ego is mobilized to take action faster rather than to remain helpless. In fact, in the version where she is at the house party, she does not need to experience the death of her family and is able to get help by the friends she was with. She still is afraid and runs away, but this time, she is not alone and she is not helpless.
While recalling her recurrent dream series, P3 remembered a dream she had had a few years prior. In this dream, she was involved in a roller coaster crash. She considered this dream significant because she is very afraid of roller coasters and is unlikely to get on one. In the dream, the roller coaster she is on crashes, she gets hurt and loses her legs. Like in the house party dream, she is helped off of the roller coaster by her friends who were at the bottom of the structure, she gets off, and she tries to run away. However, her legs had been amputated in the crash, and instead seem to have been replaced by these “boxes” that allowed her to move and flee the scene of the crash. 75
She also recalled a dream she had had very recently, just a week before the interview, in which she notices that her father is driving what looks like a child’s toy car, and he is texting and not paying attention to the road. In a panic, she chases after him and tries to get him to look up at the road but he could no hear her. Her father then crashes into a backyard and into another car.
She pulls him out of the car and he is dead. His head have been decapitated, although somehow she is able to still see his face. Finally, she is distressed by the fact that the rest of her family was not reacting in the way she would have imagined and she was the only one crying.
These dreams are technically not part of her recurrent dream series, but they are included because they were elicited in the dreamer when talking about her recurrent dream series. In addition, they illustrate aspects of her dreamworld that seem to be repeated patterns. For example, like the recurrent dream series, the roller coaster dream and the car crash dream are all dangerous and elicit a fear response. In addition, there is an element of up and down through her dreams. In the recurrent series, the first sign of danger is in the basement, downstairs. She then goes upstairs to the safety of her parents’ bedroom, but to really escape, she needs to get back down to the street. In all the dreams in this series, her way of escaping is to climb out of a window and drop down. In the roller coaster dream, she is also needing to climb down, and much like the version of the recurrent series where she is at the house party, she is helped down by friends before being able to run away.
In the dream of her father’s car crash, like in her first few iterations of the recurrent dream series, her father ends up being killed. In the recurrent dream series, she runs away from the scene, while in this dream she runs towards it. Unlike the recurrent series, in this dream she is the one doing the chasing, albeit to save her father rather than to hurt him. In addition, like in the roller coaster dream, there is a crash and an amputation. This time, her father’s head. It is of note 76 that her father’s amputation is of the head, the top, the connection between thought and emotion, while her amputation is of her legs, the bottom, inhibiting her mobility and ability to escape.
These details are subject to interpretation, and without speaking to the dreamer extensively and analyzing her dreams in the context of her life, the true meanings of her dreams are impossible to determine. However, making note of the details can help make comparisons between dreamers as well as help uncover patterns of dreaming in future dream studies.
P4:
P4 recounted a series of recurrent dreams in which the main theme was the experience of being/feeling trapped. During her interview, she reported a main recurrent dream series, the one she recalled when she signed up for this study, and some additional dreams that emerged during the interview as associations to the main series. All of the dreams she talked about shared the experience of being trapped and a feeling of fear and helplessness.
P4’s main recurrent dream series took place on a beach with her family. In the dreams, she wanted to get away from her family and so she would run away, through a gate and around a fence, along a mountain cliff above the ocean. As she walked around the maintain she would come to find a cave that was filled with water and there was an abandoned ship inside of it.
Suddenly, she finds herself on this boat, and being scared for her life as the boat rocks violently in crashing ocean waves. P4 added that in real life she is afraid of deep waters, making this dream particularly scary, and reported having various dreams in that time period in which water was involved, as well as the themes of running away and feeling trapped. This particular dream involved all three of those themes, as she runs away from her family and later finds herself trapped in a boat on the ocean. 77
The second time she has this dream, she experiences time differently. She recalls that the beginning part of the dream where she goes off from the beach, through the gate, and along the mountain cliff is experiences as a shortened version, as if this part was sped up. P4 attributed this change to the idea that this part of the dream was not as important as the part where she is trapped on the boat. After she is on the boat inside the wavy cave, she remembers that she actually manages to get off the boat and walk back to safety. She does not remember how this happened, but remembers walking back to the safety of the beach towards the end of this version of the dream. The last thing she remembers is getting back to her family on the beach and her mother yelling at her asking her where she has been.
P4 then recalls another dream in which she finds herself alone in the woods, not knowing where she is or how to get back home. This dream took place about a month after the last time she had the dream where she was stuck on the boat. There is a small creek that she decides to follow. She does not remember as many details from this dream, but she was reminded of it by the similarities of being alone, scared, in a natural landscape involving water, and with the desire to find her way back home. However, in the first set of dreams, the water was the main source of fear, the reason why she was in danger, while in this dream, the water in the stream is what will hopefully lead her to safety.
P4 later recalled two dreams that she had about a year prior to the first recurrent set described above. In this first dream, it was the Summer and she was in some kind of a barbeque or picnic. She made food and wanted to show it to a man that was there, someone she used to know from school. As she was showing him the food, he was just staring at her, not saying anything, and had his hand behind his back. In that moment, she remembers being instantly 78 afraid of him and turns around to run away knowing that he has a knife and intends to stab her.
She wakes up with a sharp pain in her back.
Lastly, P4 described a dream that occurred about two months prior to the first recurrent set described above. In this dream, there was a home invasion and burglars have tied up a man a woman. P4 believes she was the woman in the dream but was confused by the dreamer point of view. Her confusion is shown in her statement “but I don’t know if I was the woman or if I was watching, I feel like I was the woman though.” Then, the burglars begin to cut the woman open and she remembers feeling terrified and paralyzed. She remembers screaming and being unable to move until she finally awoke.
One can look at the series of dreams described in a few different ways. First, one can just look at the two sets of the recurrent dream she described at the beginning of the interview about being trapped on the boat. Just focusing on those two dreams, one can interpret the changes within the limits of just two dreams. There are two main differences between the first and the second dream. First, the second dream is experienced as fast forwarding through the less meaningful parts, according to P4, and focusing on the dominant scene of feeling scared and trapped on the rocking boat. The second, and seemingly significant difference, is the fact that in the second dream she actually remembers being able to get off the boat and making her way safely back to her family. The dominant emotion is both of these dreams was the same, fear for her life, and feeling helpless and trapped. However, like in P3’s recurrent dream, where her drop from the window gets shorter in different dream iterations over time, in P4’s second dream, her way to the cave boat gets shorter too. Lastly, although she does not remember how she got off the boat, the fact that she was indeed able to get off the boat and walk to safety is indicative of 79 some form of resolution, and a decrease in the intensity of the fear and helplessness originally felt.
Another way to look at this recurrent dream is by adding the context of the other dreams that P4 associated to during this interview. She described two dreams that happened prior to the recurrent dream and one after. In the two dreams that happened before the recurrent dream of the boat, she was physically attacked. In one of these dreams, she was stabbed in the back with a knife while attempting to run away, while in the other dream she was “cut open” while tied down with no opportunity to escape or fight back. The dominant emotions in these dreams were terror and helplessness, and she was the victim of violent attacks.
With this context in place, her two recurrent dreams were a decrease in the intensity of the emotions felt, and instead of being the victim of attack by an other, she was the victim of herself. She made her way to the cave and into the boat that ended up being so dangerous. Like the knife in her back and the burglars cutting her open, the sharp imaginary continued in this set of dreams both by the “crashing waves” and the “sharp, shagged spikes” along the cave. In these dreams however, she is not hurt by them, and instead manages to escape and make it to shore, back to the safety of the family she was running away from.
Chronologically, the last dream was the dream where P4 finds herself lost in the woods, alone and afraid. In the dream she is scared because she does not know where she is or where she has to go. However, there is no terror, no paralysis, no attacks, and no helplessness. Instead, she knows she has to follow the stream and it will possibly lead her back. The continuum from pre recurrent set of dreams to post recurrent dream delineates a progression from helpless, passive victim of aggression, to an active pursuant of her own safety. The intensity of the fear and 80 helplessness experienced seems to reduce in accordance with the dreamer ego’s increased agency.
P5:
P5 reported a main recurrent dream series that he remembered having about a year prior to this interview. All the dreams in this recurrent set took place in quick succession, within a span of a couple of weeks. In addition, he reported another series of dreams that took place a few years prior to the main recurrent dream, and one dream that he had soon after the main recurrent set which he associated to during the interview.
In the first version of the main recurrent dream, P5 was walking on a sidewalk along a tall wall on his right side. He saw a parked car, facing his direction as he walked along the sidewalk. He remembers having an ominous feeling that the person in the car was watching him.
With a strong feeling of dread that something bad was about to happen, he starting walking away. As he started walking a away, he noticed that the man from the car was now following behind him, faster and faster. At that point, P5 got very scared for his life and attempted to run faster. Instead, he realized that his “legs were like cement,” and the more he tried to run, the heavier his legs felt. P5 woke up as the man was about to catch up to him.
In dream two of the series, P5 recalls standing and facing one direction, when he notices that people were running away from the direction he was facing, being followed by something.
Then, he noticed a “big, kind of amorphous thing” that was chasing the people and at that moment became afraid and started to run away in the direction the other people were running.
Like the first dream, his ability to run was inhibited. Although it felt like he was running through snow, he felt he was somewhat in control and able to run away from the monster that was chasing him. Then, somebody hands him a hand gun and he starts shooting the monster as he is 81 running away. Then, he remembers coming across a bigger weapon, “a rifle or machine gun,” and he picked up and kept on running. He later gets to a building where he slides down towards the door, turns around and shoots up at the monster with his new, more powerful gun. Although the monster is much bigger and taller than he is, he keeps shooting until the monster gets closer and closer and he wakes up.
The third version of the recurrent series is different and considerably less intense. He recalls walking with his wife along a narrow tunnel, pushing a baby carriage with his daughter in it. As they are nearing the end of the tunnel that leads out to a few houses on a street, he notices that behind him are two very large animals running towards their direction. Although he was afraid for their safety, he understood that these animals were not aiming at them, were not trying to hurt them intentionally. Had they remained in their path, they wouldn’t gotten killed or seriously hurt, but, instead, they make it out of the tunnel and quickly move to the side, with the animals whisking by them straight into the house that was in front of the tunnel.
All three of these dreams include the theme of being watched or chased, being in danger, and having to escape a threat. However, notable differences are observed. From dream one to dream two there is a significant change in the agency of the dreamer. In dream one, the dominant emotion is fear and powerlessness, as P5 is chased and unable to run or move away from the threat. In dream two, although P5 is also being chased by a powerful threat, he is more able to run away, more in control of his movements, and he is also able to fight back and shoot. The experience of the second dream compared to the first was considerably less intense and the dreamer has more agency in his actions as described below:
“There was definitely fear towards the beginning when I
was running away. But I never experienced dread. I was much 82
more in control. There was no powerlessness in this one. I was
afraid when I was running away and it was like scary, but like it
wasn’t the same. It wasn’t that I couldn’t move my legs, that was
like oh my god I can’t do anything. It wasn’t like that.”
The third dream continued with the themes of fear, danger, and needing to escape a threat. However, the threat was not experienced to be targeted towards the dreamer, but rather the dreamer being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In order to escape the threat this time, which included threatening his family, all they had to do was walk to the side and let the animals run past them. There was no need to fight or hide, they just needed to get out of the way and were able to do that successfully and without any movement inhibitions. Each of these dreams is was experienced as less intense than the dream that preceded it, and the actions by the dreamer were more in control from one dream to the next.
To add even more context to the dreamer, P5 recounted a few dreams from before this recurrent set. In one dream, he was in room that in an instant was overwhelmed by a wave of water. He was afraid and completely out of control. In the next dream reported, he was in a car with his brother. His brother was driving too fast in a windy road and P5 was begging him to slow down. Instead of slowing down, his brother showed no indication of hearing him, and a few seconds later lost control of the car and drove off a cliff. Finally, he had a dream where he was in a house, and realized that there was a man that was hunting him down from a balcony above and trying to kill him. He wanted to be alert so that he could escape this threat, but noticed that his hearing was muffled and he could not see. All of these dreams have in common a feeling of fear and helplessness. The dreamer was helpless to act to save himself in all three of the dreams.
First, the water fully immersed and overwhelmed him. Second, he was a passenger in a car that 83 was driven off a cliff. And third, he was being hunted down and unable to see or hear. From this perspective, the recurrent dream set could be interpreted as progress towards increased agency and control, leading to diminished fear and intensity of emotion.
Lastly, P5 recounted a dream that took place after the recurrent set. In this dream, he finds himself on a flying mattress that he is in control off. At one point he notices that he is no longer in control and is flying higher and higher. At this point he becomes extremely afraid that he will fall from the sky. This could be understood as moving backwards in the psycho- emotional continuum that the recurrent dream is addressing. P5’s own interpretation of this dream is that it is about relapsing in his recovery from internet addiction. If this were the case, it would indeed indicate backwards movement in his attempts at control and mastery over his addiction.
P6:
P6 recalled two sets of related recurrent dreams over a span of three years. The content of these dreams revolved around her romantic relationship at the time. The first set occurred within the first year and a half of their three year relationship, and the second set occurred soon after the end of the relationship.
P6 remembered having the first set of recurrent dreams between ten and 15 times within that first year and half of their relationship. Sometimes she remembered most of the dream and sometimes she remembered “an abbreviated version, but it was clearly sort of the same thing. It felt the same.” The first version of this recurrent series started a few weeks after her and her boyfriend started dating. She remembered being in a car with a man, someone else, not her boyfriend, and having a great time. Then she added that in the first dream the other man was her previous boyfriend, but that over the course of the dream series, the man shifted into an unknown 84 person. She remembered talking and laughing, and sometimes kissing, overall having a really good time. Until, all of a sudden, she would realize that she is dating her boyfriend and would be overcome by an overwhelming sense of guilt, as if she were cheating on her boyfriend. In this
“flash of guilt,” she would wake up.
She continued to have this sort of dream consistently for about a year and half.
Sometimes the dreams were shorter, sometimes the setting and the content shifted a little. For example, sometimes they were in a field, or her parents’ house, while other times there were in a car driving, and sometimes parked. She recalls that it was her father’s car when a car was involved, and that they were often parked outside of her parents’ house. The main difference that she remembered took place in the last dream of the recurrent series. At the moment where she had the flash of guilt along with the realization that she was cheating on her boyfriend, the man turned into her boyfriend and she realized that, within this last dream, it was his boyfriend all along.
Reading into the patterns of this recurrent set alone, P6 understood this dream as portraying the conflicting feelings she had towards her boyfriend at the time. She mentioned that there were parts of him that she really loved and parts of him that she wished were different. She had doubts about the relationship and was feeling guilty about her it. She believes that the last time when she had this dream, when the man turned into his boyfriend, that was around the time where she was feeling the most satisfied in the relationship. Therefore, the intensity of the feeling of guilt and betrayal was reduced in the last version of this set when she was able to recognize that the unknown person she was having a great time with was actually her boyfriend.
There seem to be no changes in the continuum of passive to active within the dreamer ego. 85
The dominant feeling in this set of dreams was happiness and excitement at first, followed by a pang of guilt and betrayal. A sense of having done something wrong, and that she was hurting her boyfriend. Upon waking, she would find relief in realizing she had not cheated on her boyfriend, but also sadness that she was continually reminded that she was not entirely happy in the relationship. During the interview, she contemplated if she was having this dream because it was too upsetting to consciously think about how unsatisfied she was in the relationship and how much of a burden it sometimes felt to be with him. After this last dream in the series where the man she was with in the car turned out to be his boyfriend, she did not have this dream again.
The next set of recurrent dreams, dubbed The Epilogue by P6, took place a few weeks after breaking up with her boyfriend of three years. In this dream, she would be laying in her bed, having recently broken up with her boyfriend, when she would suddenly realize that she only broke up with half of him and forgot to tell the other half. She was then again overcome by a strong feeling of guilt and sense that she had abandoned him, and that the half of him that she forgot to break up with would not understand why she is not calling. During the interview, she remembered, for the first time, that the half of her boyfriend that she had broken up with was the
“bad” one and the one that she forgot to break up with was the “good” one. She understood this as having made peace with breaking up with the bad parts of their relationship, and that it was harder to end the good in it. She felt that this set of recurrent dreams were helping her process the
“massive shift” that she was undergoing. She did not recall any differences within this set of recurrent dreams and seems to not have been able to experience relief towards the end of the series. 86
Looking at both sets of recurrent dreams as one, there is some observable movement. In the first dream she is confused about who she is dating, and is overcome by guilt by the idea that she may have cheated on her boyfriend. If this dream was perhaps alluding to her wish to be with someone else, to end the relationship. The second set of dreams moves toward that wish. Despite the fact that she had, in real life, broken up with her boyfriend, she was still experiencing guilt about what she did. Both dreams end with a feeling of guilt, and upon waking, relief. In the first, she is relieved that she had not cheated on her boyfriend, while in the second, she is relieved that she had indeed broken up with him. However, there does not seem to be a move towards increased agency by the dreamer ego throughout these series. The first set does end with a decrease in the intensity of the emotion when she realizes that the man was her boyfriend all along, but the second set of dreams does not appear to lead to a decrease in the felt intensity of the emotions.
87
Chapter 5: Discussion
This study aimed to explore the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers by analyzing the dreamers’ manifest content and themes, and to explore the potential functions of changes within individual dreamers’ recurrent dreams series over time. Particular attention was paid to the changes in the intensity of the dominant emotion in each dream series, as well as the experienced sense of agency by the dreamer ego. Additionally, this study sought to analyze and compare the emergent themes in recurrent dream series across individual dreamers utilizing the
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis technique. For this study, recurrent dreams were operationalized as two or more dreams that were very similar in the emotions felt by the dreamer, sequence of events, and actions taken or not taken by the dreamer.
A summary of the results indicates that recurrent dreams are likely to contain similar clusters of meaning across individuals. There were nine individual themes identified in at least two or more of the research participants. Moreover, the nine themes can be further classified into four clusters, Helplessness/Powerlessness, Connection/Separation, Danger, (Lefting, 2012) and
Symmetrical Logic (Matte-Blanco, 1975). These four clusters will be reviewed in detail below.
On an individual level, the combination of previous research, dreaming theories, and this study’s data leads to the possible interpretation that active and positive changes in an individual’s dream series over time, and decreased intensity of the dominant emotion in the dream, may signify growth in an area of emotional or developmental arrest, or even the resolution of an underlying problem. Therefore, it is possible that a function of recurrent dreaming is that it is therapeutic in itself via the mechanism of experience integration (Bion 1962; Hartmann, 2001;
Ogden, 2004a; Schneider, 2010). Further research is necessary to distinguish if recurrent dream 88 series that include positive changes over time are creating the dream integration and functioning therapeutically, or if they are a representation of unconscious change that is taking place within.
Personal Experience and Bias
For a qualitative, exploratory study such as this, it is imperative to continually look at one’s own preconceptions and biases in order to minimize their influence on decision-making and interpretation of data, as well as in the gathering of data and development of the research design. As was aforementioned, the writer’s interest in the topic of recurrent dreams emerged from his own experiences of recurrent dreaming, both in childhood and young adulthood.
Through this experiences, this writer is aware of his own perceptions of the function of recurrent dreams, and his expected progression of dream series over time.
The writer’s pre-study beliefs led to his expectation that dream series that change over time, towards an experience of a more active dreamer ego with increase agency in his dream actions would lead to a decrease in the intensity of the emotion, and towards a resolution of the underlying problem represented by the dream. However, no hypotheses were made a priori in order to minimize the impact of these beliefs on the study. Instead, interview questions were geared towards the subjective experience of the dreamer, and the potential changes within a dream series without the implication of what those changes could mean, and without assuming that any changes occurred. In addition, the emergent themes, both within and across participants, were observed within the data and no themes were pre-determined before the data was compiled and analyzed.
Finally, a vignette of the writer’s own recurrent dream series was utilized in chapter 2 as a facilitator in illustrating the differing theories of dreaming and how they would each understand the same dream differently. The writer’s dream was not used to inform which 89 theories were reviewed, nor which themes to focus on when analyzing the participants’ dreams.
Of course, a limitation of this, and all, studies is the unavoidable presence of unconscious biases that guide the work. The continuous self-examination throughout the process of the study likely reduced the influence the writer exerted on the study itself, but this writer does not claim to have complete control of his own unconscious motivations and biases, as that would be an unattainable goal.
An example of the lack of influence by the writer’s own recurrent dream experience in the thematic analysis is the absence of dreamer aggression/violence as one of the emergent themes. Before conducting and analyzing the interviews, the writer expected more aggression/violence on the part of the dreamer ego. However, dreamer ego aggression/violence was virtually non-existent, with the exception of one dream in P5’s recurrent series where he shoots back as he runs away. Instead, the majority of the dreamer’s experience regarding violence was as the victim rather than the perpetrator.
Recurrent Dream Frequency, Onset, and Duration
This study found that individuals recurrent dream frequency, onset, and duration varied greatly. The participants’ recurrent dreams ranged in frequency from just two remembered iterations of their dream, to over 10. P4 reported having her recurrent dream only two times, P1,
P2, and P5 reported having their recurrent dream between three and six times, while P3 and P6 experienced their recurrent dream over 10 times. The duration of the recurrent dreams was not always clear to the participant, as some of these dreams occurred quite a few years before this interview. Some reported having the dream series take place within a few months, while others reported having different iterations of their over the course of three or four years. Finally, the onset of these recurrent dreams also varied widely. Some recall the onset of their recurrent dream 90 as starting in their early adolescence, while others reported recurrent dreams that began in their young adulthood. A limitation to this study, which will be elaborated on in the Limitations section, is the potentially reliability issues with memory, especially when the dreams occurred in childhood and adolescence. For comparison and added data, the writer’s own recurrent dream series began in his early twenties, lasted about three years, and had four remembered iterations.
Emergent Themes Across Participants’ Dreams
Nine dream themes were identified across participants’ dream series. In order to be included in the results, a theme must have been present in at least two of the six participants’ dreams. The following are the nine themes that cut across participants and their respective prevalence in order from most to least frequent. Death (100%), Family/Friends (100%), Being
Watched/Chased (83%), Fear/Helplessness (66%), Collapse of Time (66%), Dread (66%),
Paralysis (50%), Psychic Equivalence (50%), Mourning/Closure (33%). In order to better understand the potential significance of these themes, they were further organized into four clusters of meaning.
The first three clusters, Helplessness/Powerlessness, Connection/Separation, and Danger, are in close agreement with the recurrent dream themes identified in The Meaning of Recurrent
Dreams in Our Waking Lives (Lefting, 2012). The fourth cluster, Symmetrical Logic, includes the remaining individual themes identified in this study, Collapse of Time and Psychic
Equivalence.
Cluster One: Helplessness/Powerlessness
Cluster one includes the individual themes of Fear/Helplessness and Paralysis. These themes have in a common a feeling of powerlessness over a central conflict within the dream.
This experience of powerlessness is manifested in different ways, such as being lost and alone, 91 feeling trapped, being unable to move without inhibition, trying to communicate and not being heard, being unable to see or hear properly, being completely overwhelmed by an outside force, being abandoned, or losing one’s caregivers.
Although all of these experiences can be included within the helplessness/powerlessness umbrella, they are felt very differently by each dreamer. Additionally, the general conflict and details within each dream varies significantly, suggesting that these dreams are personalized for the problem of the dreamer and there can be no one-size-fits-all interpretation to understand what they could mean. Therefore, even though each person’s conflict is unique to their specific life, and each dream is tailored to navigate it in their own way, it is worth noting that the majority of the participants shared the experience of powerlessness in their recurrent dreams.
The dreams collected for this study did not include any traumatic dreams directly correlated to a singular event in a participant’s life. However, some of the participants did connect their dreams to specific relationships, intense fears, or conflicting situations in which they felt stuck or unable to resolve. For example, some of the recurrent dreams were connected to relationships that had ended, fear of parent’s dying and leaving them alone, and difficult life transitions and decisions. Therefore, this theme could be interpreted as an attempt at mastery over past events or future anxieties.
Cluster Two: Connection/Separation
Cluster two includes the individual themes of Death, Family/Friends, and
Mourning/Closure. This cluster was present in every single recurrent dreams series, suggesting that interpersonal connection and separation is highly important and laden with emotional intensity. All six participants had a dream that, in one way or another, included the theme of death and the presence (or absence) of significant personal relationships (parents, partners, 92 grandparents, friends, siblings). In these dreams, interpersonal separation was experienced through death, loss, relationship ruptures, and unfortunate accidents. Often, these losses were about loved ones who are still very much part of the dreamer’s life, potentially highlighting a fear of future loss or a strained aspect of the relationships. On the other side, in instances in which the actual lived experience of the participant included the loss of a significant relationship thought either death or distance, recurrent dreams allowed for a renewed connection with these others, giving the dreamer an opportunity to work though these losses or conflicts. This demonstrated the importance of disrupted or unresolved relationships on the emotional well- being of individuals, and the unconscious attempts to work through them.
Moreover, the theme of disrupted communication was also present in the inability to connect to others. For example, calling out to a loved one and not being heard, trying to save a loved one from an impending doom and being unable to reach them. Additionally, the theme of separation and disconnection was present through the physical severing of body parts. This can speak to both the separation from others, as well as the separation between body and mind. If a recurrent dream can be understood as an attempt at integration of emotional experience, then a decapitation or a loss of limbs can be interpreted as representing a disconnect between one’s unconscious emotional experience (the body) and one’s conscious experience (the mind).
Cluster Three: Danger
Cluster three includes the individual themes of dread and being watched/chased.
Dangerous and threatening situations, especially the emotions of fear and apprehension, have been found to be frequently reported in both adult (67%) and childhood (79%) recurrent dreams
(Cartwright, 1979; Robert & Zadra, 2014; Zadra, 1996). In fact, Zadra found that the most frequently recorded recurrent dream theme for both children and adults was the theme of being 93 chased (1994). It has also been suggested that the frequent presence of negative emotions in recurrent dreams can be understood by the finding that recurrent dreams tend to occur in times of stress (Zadra, 2014).
In this study, the themes of dread and being watched/chased were present in five of the six participants. These dreams had different manifestations, but shared in the feeling of being the victim of a threat by an unknown source. In some cases, the threat was coming from a fantastical creature or a wild animal, while in others the threat was a more realistic, human or human-like assailant. According to previous findings, the presence of threats by fantastical, fictional, or wild animals could indicate a developmental arrest dating back to childhood, and being chased by a more human-like assailant would suggest a higher level of psychological/emotional growth
(Hartmann, 2001; Zadra, 1994).
Furthermore, the theme of dread was very interesting in that it was not only about fear and danger, but it was about the anticipation of fear and danger. Anticipation can be interpreted in different ways, one of those ways being that it is a way to prepare. If one can expect the worst, then the worst will not have as intense an impact. It is an attempt at controlling situations that feel out of control. For example, when P1 dreamt about her parents dying in an explosion, she said that losing her parents would be the single worst thing that could ever happen to her, especially being an only-child. The recurrent nightmare of losing her parents might be an attempt to manage the intense anxiety and fear associated with being left alone. This was further exemplified by her “random” association to the movie Lone Survivor, where a soldier is left alone in the middle of a warzone and has to find his way to safety on his own. As described in the Results section, dread is associated with the expectation that something bad will happen, an ominous feeling of anticipation that, in dreams, appears to often be played out “all of a sudden.” 94
Suddenness, surprise, danger, these are experiences that are hard to prepare for, and recurrent dreams with these themes might be attempting to control what is perceived to be uncontrollable.
Lefting suggested that recurrent dreams “are the dreamer’s attempt to cope with a distressing event, whether it is from the present or past” (2012), but the pervasiveness of dread in recurrent dreams might also signal to the attempt to cope with a future distressing event that is causing anxiety in the present. According to the writer’s view on recurrent dreams, and similar to the theories put forward by Hartmann, Bion, Ogden, and Jung (Bion 1962; Hartmann, 2001;
Jung, 1964; Ogden, 2004a), a recurrent dream might serve to connect anxieties about the future with already processed emotional experience from the past or present in order to integrate these anxieties into the whole of the person’s lived experiences, including successful mechanisms of coping with past anxieties.
Cluster Four: Symmetrical Logic
Cluster four includes the individual themes of Collapse of Time and Psychic
Equivalence. Symmetrical Logic is one half of Matte Blanco’s mathematical set theory of the conscious and unconscious functions of the mind (Lombardi, 2019; Matte-Blanco, 1975). As explained by Lombardi, “like unconscious process, symmetry is ruled by such nonlinear qualities as timelessness, spacelessness, and the absence of negation” (2019, p. 441). The logic of difference and separation, in contrast, is within Matte Blanco’s asymmetrical logic. The collapse of time in dreams and the experience of psychic equivalence are great examples of the mode of symmetry because they defy the rules of conscious life. In our waking, conscious experience, we cannot fast forward time or shorten physical distances. Furthermore, the experience of psychic equivalence is symmetrical in that, for a short time, there is no distinction between what is in the mind and what it external. This experience was perfectly demonstrated by P4 dreaming she is 95 being stabbed in the back by a knife, and waking up to a sharp pain in her back, with the momentary certainty that she was indeed stabbed. The presence of a symmetrical mode of being in dreams appears to be evidence that the unconscious is governed by different rules (or lack of rules) and potentially suggests that the impact of dreams is greater than what can be comprehended, because comprehension is tied to asymmetrical mode of being and thinking, ruled by differentiation and limits. In fact, it is believed that upon waking, we are already reorganization our “memory” of our dreams in ways that can “make sense” in consciousness.
Therefore, a limitation of dream studies is the likely unreliability of the remembered dream.
Changes Over Time Within Recurrent Dream Series
Unlike repetitive, traumatic dreams, recurrent dreams series tend to have variations. The extent of these variations varies from person to person and from dream to dream. Sometimes the only changes regard the setting and the background, sometimes the characters change, and other times, the ending might change. One of the goals of this study was to learn in what ways changes occur within a dream series over time, and what those changes might mean. One assumption made by the writer, detailed in the Personal Experience and Bias section of this chapter, and in agreement with several dream theorists (Bion 1962; Hartmann, 2001; Jung, 1964; Ogden,
2004a), is that positive changes to a dream series, such as increased agency and decreased intensity of emotion (especially when the dream is unpleasant) may reflect a change in the dreamer’s waking life that suggest a working-through of a personal conflict. As stated above, this assumption was present in the writer’s mind throughout the process of this study in order to minimize its impact as personal bias.
However, the data presented and the subsequent analysis suggest that this might be the case. The personal experience of the dreamers whose dream series changes over time towards 96 increased agency and decreased intensity of emotion reported a more positive perception of the recurrent dream. In some cases, the dreamer reported welcoming a new version of their dream series in the future, citing interest in how the dream would play out. The writer’s own experience also reflects this. The first two dreams in the writer’s dream series were experienced as very unsettling and scary, while the following two iterations were received with increased interest and curiosity and diminished fear. As was the case with some of the study participants, the writer’s progression of his dream series also moved towards increased agency over the actions taken.
According to P1, her recurrent dreams did not change over time and the intensity of the dominant emotions- fear, dread, and helplessness- remained constant, as did the dreamer’s lack of agency in her (in)actions. According to the theories discussed throughout this study, P1’s continued passive role and the unchanging events within the dream, would suggest that, at the time these dreams were taking place, she was unable to move towards a resolution of the underlying conflict the dream may reflect.
P2 reported that her dreams remained almost identical from one version to the next, with the exception of the topic of conversation between her and her deceased grandmother. The topic of what they would talk about where always directly related to what was currently happening in her waking life, events that she would have talked about with her grandmother had she been alive. In this case, the dreamer takes an active role in the dream by driving to the diner and engaging in conversation. Upon waking, P2 would often feel the sadness of realizing her grandmother is no longer alive. However, she reported that after continued dreams, her sadness upon waking would decrease over time and her felt connection with her grandmother would increase. 97
P3’s reported dream changes are most effectively portrayed in the symbolism of the height of the jump she had to make to escape being shorter than in previous versions of the dream. In addition, in later versions of the dream, the threat would occur at someone else’s house, further removing the threat from her and her family. P3 also reported that the first time she had to jump and escape the assailant she was very afraid, and that in subsequent versions of the dream, the fear was much less intense. Although escaping might be interpreted as running away from her problems, she took a very active role in getting herself out of a dangerous situation by running and flying away from the threat. Lastly, in subsequent versions of her dream she is rarely alone when the threat presents itself and has friends to help her get to safety, and she is also able to get away without needing to experience the death of her family.
P4 reported a significant change from one dream to the next. In her main recurrent dream reported, she is trapped and afraid in a violently rocking boat not knowing how to get off it. She then recalled that the next time she had the dream, not only was a portion of the dream “fast- forwarded,” but she also remembered getting off the boat and getting back to her family safely.
This significant change could be considered a resolution or a movement towards it by the dreamer. Additionally, the dreams that P4 associated to during the interview may suggest a continued progression towards resolution of a personal conflict that is represented by the chronologically evident increase in agency and decrease in the intensity of negative emotions.
P5 reported a series of dreams in which he is being chased. There is a noticeable decrease in the intensity of the dominant emotion from one dream to the next, which appears to correlate with his increased agency within the dream. In the first dream, he is being chased by an unknown man, and as the man runs faster towards him, his movement is inhibited and he cannot get away.
He wakes up as the man is about to reach him. In the second dream, the chaser is a huge white 98 monster, but P5’s movement is less inhibited than in the first, successfully getting away, and he is able to fight back by shooting the monster with the weapons that he finds while running away.
P5 described this dream as being significantly less stressful than the first. Last, he has a dream where he is being chased by animals. However, although in some danger, he realizes in the dream that the animals are going in his direction, but they are not actually aiming for him, he is just in the way. So, all he has to do to avoid becoming the victim of a potential attack is to move out of the way. In this progression, the increased agency is evident; from inhibited movement, to running away and shooting, to simply moving out of the way. As the agency within the dream increased, the intensity of the fear response decreased.
P6’s first set of recurrent dreams reported shows slight changes over the many iterations in a span of a year and a half. The main change in her dreams occurred in the last version of the recurrent set in which the man that she was supposedly cheating on her boyfriend with was, indeed, her boyfriend. This dream, like the previous ones, still had an initial feeling of happiness, followed by a sense of guilt that she was betraying her boyfriend. However, in the end the feelings of guilt diminished as she realized that she was with her boyfriend and not with someone else. Perhaps, this was a resolution of her ambivalence as she described that the relationship improved for over a year before it finally ended. The intensity of the dominant emotion, guilt, decreased in the last version of the recurrent dream. The agency within the dream, however, seemed to have remained constant, as the actions taken by the dreamer ego where the same from dream to dream, the only difference being who those actions were directed at. Taking into account the second set of recurrent dreams, undoubtably related to the first, there is a movement in the agency of the dreamer as she is able to break up with her boyfriend, rather than feel guilty about her desire to not be with him. This is not an interpretative assumption, as P6 realized in 99 retrospect that she had considerable ambivalence towards her boyfriend and had wanted to break up with him for a while before she finally did.
Summary of Changes Over Time
All participants experienced some changes within their recurrent dream series. The only experienced change for P1 was the dominant emotion moving from fear to dread. However, the intensity of the emotions and the agency of the dreamer ego remained constant over the series of dreams. P2, P3, P4, P5, and P6 experienced both increased agency over their actions and a decrease in the intensity of the dominant emotions within the recurrent dream series. In the cases of P2 and P6, the changes in agency were more related to the topics of conversation and the people with whom they were interacting with, while the changes in agency of the recurrent dreams for P3, P4, and P5 were about physical movement, danger, and escape. With the exception of the relatively static nature of P1’s recurrent dreams, all changes in the participants’ were in the direction of decreased negative emotions and increased feelings of normalcy and/or safety.
Based on the results of this study, the essence of recurrent dreams appears to be functional in that the dream is showing the dreamer that there is an unresolved conflict that needs to be addressed. A change within a dream series may show that the dreamer is currently undergoing change or growth. Accordingly, the dream may act as a therapeutic mechanism.
Additionally, there is preliminary evidence of an inverse relationship between dreamer ego agency and the intensity the of dominant emotion felt in the dream, in that as agency increases, the intensity of the dominant emotion decreases.
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Attributed Significance by Study Participants
Part of the interview process was asking the participants their own interpretations of their dreams. Although some participants had never talked about their dreams before, all made attempts at understanding what they could mean. P1 said that she believes we dream for a reason.
Regarding her specific dreams, she said that losing her parents would be the worst thing that could happen to her, and that this was a conscious fear of hers. Perhaps, this dream was an unconscious attempt to prepare for such a terrible event, an anticipated attempt at mastering a likely situation since in the natural progression of life, most children outlive their parents. P2’s experience of dream meaning is similar. Instead of preparing for the loss of a significant caretaker like P1, P2 mourns the loss of her grandmother though her dreams. She explained that she believes that her grandmother is talking to her through her dreams, visiting her because they did not get a chance to have a proper goodbye. She said regarding her persistent recurrent dream,
“I think maybe why I keep having them is because we have like more to talk about.” In other words, he feels her relationship to her grandmother is unfinished, and that her dreams are allowing her to get closure. Additionally, P2 suggested that dreams sometimes help us realize that there are certain issues we are grappling with that we do not notice, and that through dreams we can be made aware of them.
P3 attributed her recurrent nightmare of needing to escape as potentially meaning that she has been running away from a problem in her life rather than facing it. She also suggested that the changes in her dreams, symbolized by the decreasing height of her jump and the increasingly smaller windows she had to jump out of, could mean that the problem she is running away from is not as big a problem as she had imagined. Alternatively, she could feel more able to deal with the problem making it more manageable and less overwhelming. Similarly, P4 interpreted her 101 dreams of being trapped as her mind trying to “figure out ways out of certain situations through like metaphors, like being stuck on a boat.” She added that in her waking like she had been feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed by unmade decisions regarding significant relationships in her life as well as decisions regarding her education and career.
P5 interpreted his recurrent dreams as representing his struggle with addiction. Being pursued by threatening people/monsters/animals reminded him of his past coming back to haunt him and the effect that had on his personal relationships. In addition, the third dream in the series where he moves out of the way of the wild animals running towards him could represent how he has to get out of his own way in order to continue a successful recovery and not let the past dictate his future. Also, the fact that he is with his wife in that third dream indicates to him that a big part of his fear is losing her due to his addiction, and in that dream, where she is there with him, he is not as afraid and can get out of the way of his addiction with her support.
Finally, P6 made sense of her recurrent dreams as showing her the ambivalence that she felt towards her boyfriend. There were parts of him that she liked and parts of him that he wished were different, and overall, she was unsure if she wanted to remain in this relationship. She believes that these dreams represent the guilt she felt about being with someone and wishing he were different, as well as sense of betrayal that consumed her when she thought about wanting to break up with him, when she also felt that he really needed her.
Overall, P1, P2, P4, P5, and P6 attributed their dreams to interpersonal conflicts such as death, loss, fear of losing a loved one, and ending relationships. Furthermore, P3, P4, and P5 attributed their dreams to intrapsychic conflicts, although those would also lead to interpersonal conflicts.
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Additional Findings
The themes of death, loss, and interpersonal relationships were present in every single participants’ recurrent dreams. This suggest that dreams, like waking life, are governed by the most meaningful aspects of people’s lives; interpersonal relationships and the inevitability of the loss of those relationships through ruptures or death. Finally, an unexpected finding, also present in Lefting’s recurrent dream research (2012), was the prevalence of multiple recurrent dreams within participants in this study. With the exception of P2, every participant reported more than one set of recurrent dreams. Similarities in themes between their recurrent dreams suggests the possibility that different sets of recurrent dreams might be evolved variations of each other
(Lefting, 2012). The differences in the manifestation of recurrent dreams across the lifespan may be related to psychosocial ego development and the specifics of waking life experiences
(Erikson, 1950; Lefting, 2012).
Limitations of the Study
This study involved six participants, limiting the generalizability of the findings. Four participants were undergraduate students in different fields, and two were psychology graduate students. Although the inclusion of college and graduate students is typical for research studies, it limits the ability to generalize the results to non-student populations. University students, especially those involved in the field of psychology, are likely to have more experience and interest in reflecting on their personal experiences. Particularly the two psychology graduate students involved in this research may be more interested and capable of understanding their own dreams as compared to the general population. Additionally, the narrow age range and the limited ethnic diversity included in this study is another limiting factor regarding the generalizability of this study to the general population. 103
Another important limitation is the retrospective nature of this study. Since this study required participants to remember dreams that they have experienced in the past, and due to the evasive nature of dreams, it is likely that they are forgetting elements of their dreams in their recall. Especially those recurrent dreams that were experienced several years prior to the study or in childhood. Interestingly, the participants who shared the most details and the most changes were participants who were describing dreams that they had had within the last few years. The dreams described by P1, who reported almost no changes, were also the oldest dreams described by any participant. It is worth investigating in future research whether recurrent dreams of long ago are remembered as having differed less, as the details are forgotten, than those recurrent dream series that are more recent. Furthermore, some participants recalled recurrent dreams that had ended years or months prior, while some recalled recurrent dreams that may not yet have ended.
Lastly, this study utilized a one-time retrospective interview, meaning that it is not possible to analyze post study effects. A longitudinal study of recurrent dreams would provide more insight into the developmental nature of recurrent dreams, the progression of dreams, and the potential effect of talking about, sharing, and processing one’s dreams as a consequence of participating in this study. Furthermore, since this was a phenomenological study focusing on the manifest content of dreams, and since these participants were not therapy patients actively analyzing these dreams, the latent, in-depth meaning of these recurrent dreams cannot be interpreted. However, the qualitative nature of this study is also a considerable strength in that it allowed for the exploration of subjective experiences and the emergence of recurrent dream themes.
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Implications for Clinical Applications and Future Research
As evidenced by the limitations of this study, future research with a larger sample can explore in greater depth the prevalence of recurrent dreams in the general population, as well as determine if different themes emerge with a more diverse sample. Following participants longitudinally can help determine the progression and potential effect of having recurrent dreams and processing them via participation in dream studies. Additionally, a longitudinal design can help determine what may contribute to variations in recurrent dreams and to the resolution and cessation of these dreams. Moreover, future studies can help determine what different themes might mean to the dreamers, and differentiate between recurrent dreams with positive, negative, or mixed affect.
In terms of clinical applications, this study shows that exploring the themes, course, and variations of a recurrent dream can be useful in helping a patient understand their own conflicts and achieve greater awareness of their struggles and greater agency in their life. In therapy, patients and therapists together would be more capable of exploring the latent, personal meaning of the patient’s recurrent dreams. Navigating the patient’s associations, observing their reactions to interpretations, and analyzing the concurrent changes in the patient’s dreams and their life can lead to a more meaningful understanding of their dreams and, consequently, lead to a more fulfilling emotional life.
Furthermore, it is worth considering the difference between dreamwork and dream interpretation when working with patients’ dreams. A very important aspect of qualitative research is its focus on nuance, and through the process of working on this dissertation, it was made more clear to the writer that working with dreams and interpreting dreams are different 105 experiences and are likely to elicit different clinical results. In addition, it is important to consider the developmental and psychological position of the patient that brings in a dream.
For some patients, particularly those who are more psychologically minded, or those that have been in therapy for some time, interpreting a dream might lead to valuable insights and discoveries. However, for patients who, as Ogden and Bion would say, are unable to dream, or experience repetitive and unchanging dreams, dreamwork may be more timely. Dreamwork, as opposed to dream interpretation, would focus on the transformational process of dreaming rather than on the latent content, and would ideally help move a patient into a position of increased desire for self-exploration and self-knowledge, without closing the door on the potential meanings of a dream through a clear, but sometimes foreclosing interpretation. Subsequently, the experience of focusing on the process of dreaming, and the joining of two minds, would hopefully help jump-start the inherent therapeutic nature of dreaming when dreaming alone is not enough.
Finally, the writer’s developing theory of dreams, further supported by the data gathered and analyzed for this dissertation, is that dreaming serves a therapeutic role that allows us to make connections of our lived experiences, both conscious and unconscious, and that movement in a previously static dream series signifies movement along the continuum of psychological and emotional growth. To aid in this process, dreamwork and dream interpretation are considered useful tools in helping a patient understand themselves, become more interested in their internal processes, and learn to live with the emotional contradictions within us that can be so hard to tolerate, and consequently, lead more intentional and emotionally meaningful lives.
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Appendix A: Tables
Table 1 General Interview Questions 1. Tell me about your recurrent dreams in the order in which they
occurred, to the best of your recollection.
2. when did you have this dream for the first time?
3. Do you remember anything that was happening in your life at the
time when you had these dreams?
4. what do you think these dreams mean?
5. Do you remember your dreams often?
6. Are most of your dreams pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral?
7. Are there any differences between your dreams in this recurrent
series? If so, what are they?
8. How did you feel in these dreams?
9. How did you feel when you woke up from them?
10. Was the feeling in the dream any different in the later versions of
the dream series?
11. What do you think is the dominant emotion in the dream?
12. Why do you think you have had this dream more than once?
13. If it changed, why do you think it changed from the original
version?
14. What makes these series of dreams so memorable?
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Table 2 Themes from Analysis of Dream Content Across Participants and Prevalence Death (100%) Family/Friends (100%) Being Watched/Chased (83%) Fear/Helplessness (66%) Collapse of Time (66%) Dread (66%) Paralysis (50%) Psychic Equivalence (50%) Mourning/Closure (33%)
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Appendix B: IRB Approval
7/29/2019 Adelphi University Mail - IRB Approval for Recurrent Dreams: A Qualitative Analysis (090317)
JULIAN RAPAPORT
IRB Approval for Recurrent Dreams: A Qualitative Analysis (090317)
Carolyn Springer
Dear Mr. Rappaport
Thank you for addressing the IRB's questions. This e-mail provides documentation that your research proposal Recurrent Dreams: A Qualitative Analysis (090317) has been approved and that you can begin your study immediately.
A more formal letter will be forthcoming shortly from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.
Best wishes on your research endeavors
Carolyn M. Springer, Ph.D IRB Chair
[Quoted text hidden]
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ik=be5b88b0ba&view=pt&search=all&permmsgid=msg-f%3A1581646152974994079&simpl=msg-f%3A1581646152974994079 1/1
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Appendix C: Informed Consent
Adelphi University Informed Consent ______
IRB Protocol Title: Recurrent Dreams: A Qualitative Analysis
Principal Investigator: Julian Rapaport, MA
Faculty Advisor: Karen Lombardi, PhD
Research Purpose The main purpose of this study is to explore the subjective experience of recurrent dreamers. Additionally, this study will explore the purpose and function of having recurrent dreams, and analyze the similarities and differences within an individual’s recurrent dream series as well as between participants’ recurrent dream series.
Description of the Research Participants will be asked to fill out a Demographic Questionnaire and take part in a 60-120 minute interview consisting of open-ended questions regarding the experience of having recurrent dreams. This interview will be audio recorded and will only be accessible to the Principal Investigator and Faculty Advisor. These recordings will be transcribed, coded, and analyzed using multiple coding methodologies both within and between study participants; all personal information will be de-identified in documents that will be password protected. Participation in this study will involve filling out this Informed Consent Form, the demographic form, the Dream Intensity Scale-Revised, and the Dream Motif Scale- Short Form-20, as well as participating in the interview. The maximum time commitment required for this study is 120 minutes. If the conclusions of this study result in a potential publication, participants will be notified in advance and will be invited to read and review the completed paper prior to its submission. It is very important to the Principal Investigator that individuals participating in this study have the opportunity to provide feedback, and will work to ensure that their words and experiences are accurately represented.
Potential Risks There are minimal potential risks to participation in this study. If you experience any discomfort after the interview or experience a distressing change in your affective state directly following the interview, you will be referred to a provider capable of assisting you in addressing your distress. If your experience of these feelings constitutes an emergency, please contact 1-800- LIFENET or 911.
Potential Benefits Potential benefits are that participants may feel a positive temporary change in your affective state directly following participation in this study, or may gain new insight into your experience. 117
Costs/Compensation Participants will be compensated for their time with a $20 gift card to a retailer or with course credit for participants who are undergraduate psychology students seeking research participation. If participants decide to withdraw from the study at any point, they will still be compensated.
Contact Persons If you have any questions at any time about this research, or wish to discuss discomfort or concerns related to this study, please contact:
Julian Rapaport (Principal Investigator): [email protected] or 786-553-0191 Dr. Karen Lombardi (Faculty Advisor): [email protected]
Confidentiality Your identity as a participant will be kept confidential in any publication of the results of this study. The information obtained during this research (research records and audio recording) will be kept confidential with access to the information restricted to the Principal Investigator and Faculty Advisor to the extent permitted by law. However, this research record may be reviewed by individuals who are authorized to monitor or audit the research or the Institutional Review Board (the committee that oversees all research in human subjects at Adelphi University) if required by applicable laws or regulations. Records will be kept confidential by coding and de- identifying all data and personal information collected during the study. Audio recordings will be kept on a password-protected computer. The material will be maintained for up to 7 years. After this time, all electronic and paper copies of research records and audio recordings will be deleted or destroyed.
Voluntary Participation Participation in this study is voluntary. If you should feel uncomfortable at any time, for any reason, you may withdraw from this study.
Any new information that develops during this study, which might affect your decision to participate, will be given to you immediately.
A signed copy of this consent form will be given to you.
Institutional Review Board Approval This research has been reviewed and approved by the Adelphi University Institutional Review Board. If you have any questions, concerns or comments, please contact the IRB chair, Dr. Carolyn Springer, 516-877-4753; [email protected].
Consent for Minors/People with Legal Guardians No minors will be recruited in this study, therefore no consent for minors/people with legal guardians will be necessary.
Signature
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Person Obtaining Consent Print Name______
Signature______Date ___/___/___
Study Participant Print Name______
Signature______Date ___/___/___
Consent to Audio Record
______Date ___/___/___ Signature
Participant ID: ______
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Appendix D: Demographics Form
Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology Adelphi University
Participant Demographics Form Participant ID:
Date of Birth: ___/___/___ Age: _____ Gender: ______
Race & Ethnicity: How do you identify your ethnicity? ______How do you identify your race? ______
Religion: How do you identify your religion? ______
Language: What is your first language? ______List all languages you consider yourself fluent in ______
Please circle the answer that most applies to you. Education Are you currently a student? YES or NO If yes, what is your student status? 1) First year 2) Second year 3) Third year 4) Fourth year 5) Fifth year or beyond 6) Masters 7) Doctorate
Which university do you attend? 1) Adelphi University 2) Other ______
Highest level of education attained by a parent: 1) Did not finish high school 2) Graduated from high school 120
3) Attended college but did not complete degree 4) Completed an Associate degree 5) Completed a Bachelor’s degree 6) Completed a Master’s degree 7) Completed a Doctoral or Professional degree (e.g., JD, MD, PhD)
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your identity or background? ______
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Appendix E: Interview Questions
Project: The Past is Never Dead: A Qualitative Analysis of Recurrent Dreams
Semi-structured Interview Questions
• Tell me about your recurrent dreams, in the order in which they occurred. • When did you have the first version of the recurrent dream? • About how far apart did the dreams in the series happen? • Do you remember anything that was happening in your life at the time when you had the first one? How about the others? • What do you think these dreams mean? • Have you analyzed/discussed your dream in any way before? (In therapy, with friends/family, by yourself) • Do you have nightmares? How often? • Are most of your dreams pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? • Do you remember your dreams often? • What are the most notable differences between your dreams in this recurrent series? • How did you feel in the dream? • How did you feel when you woke up? • Was the feeling any different in the later versions of the dream series? • What do you think is the dominant emotion in the dream? • Why do you think you had this dream more than once? • Why do you think it changed from the original version? • What makes these series of dreams so memorable?
• Can you describe the worst nightmare you ever had? • Can you describe the most blissful dream you ever had? • Have you ever had a dream where you felt paralyzed or unable to speak? • Are there other memorable dreams that you have had? • What is the earliest dream that you remember? • Have you ever had any unexplained physical symptoms?